


Orbs Upon the Green

by redbadger



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Voldemort Wins, F/M, M/M, Sort Of, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-06-15 14:20:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 30,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15414879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redbadger/pseuds/redbadger
Summary: Harry Potter goes missing during the Yule Ball. He does not reappear for nearly quarter of a century. In his absence, Voldemort takes over the wizarding world.





	1. Prologue

On the night of the Yule Ball, Harry Potter went missing. He was last seen by Rubeus Hagrid leaving the rose garden and walking towards the Forbidden Forest. The search of the castle and grounds began in the early hours of Boxing Day but no trace of the boy was found. Rita Skeeter broke the story in the next day’s _Prophet_. The piece was illustrated by a photograph of Harry and Parvati Patil opening the Yule Ball. The pair waltzed across the frame from right to left before the image looped. Months later, when hopes of finding Harry had faded, someone stuck an enlarged copy of the photograph over the fireplace in the Gryffindor common room. The photograph remained there until Voldemort took Hogwarts.


	2. Chapter 2

Luna gave up many things during the War. She never gave up on Harry Potter.

In the years following his disappearance, Luna tried hundreds of tracing spells. None of them worked. One spell that she found in a Victorian book on child rearing, required a complex wand movement that took two weeks to perfect and told her that he was moving and alive. Every time she cast the spell, it produced the same result. The only attempt that had any further success was a dark potion, taken from a book she had found among her mother’s effects. The potion took three weeks to brew and required a hair of the person sought and a pint of the searcher’s blood. She brewed it in a room the house elves told her about. Instead of going to the end of term feast, she crept into the deserted Gryffindor common room. Over two years later, Harry’s bed remained exactly as he had left it, a towel thrown over the headboard, a dried glass of water, a book face down on the pillow to mark a page. She took his hairbrush from the bedside table and stole away.

Luna gave up her place at Hogwarts when the Death Eaters came for her in Sixth Year. Hermione tipped her off by owl the night before the Carrows blasted open the Ravenclaw Common Room seeking her. While Terry Boot was being interrogated about her whereabouts, Luna was halfway to her father's house. She hid in the attic of her family home for five months, writing inflammatory but mostly true articles about the sexual proclivities of the Death Eaters for the _Quibbler_.

Luna gave up on her father when he bartered with the Death Eaters, exchanging Ron and Hermione's location for her safety. She fled to Grimmauld Place, destroying the Quibbler printing press before she left. Later, she moved between Order safe houses and tents that never stayed in position for more than a day.

Luna gave up the Order when the snatchers came for them in the Forest of Dean. She told the snatcher holding her how to find Grimmauld Place. She told him there were Order members there. He relaxed his grip just enough to allow her to apparate blindly. When she found herself stood on the dock of a small Fife fishing village where her father’s sailing boat was tied, she took it as a sign. In the years before her Hogwarts’ letter had arrived, her father had taught her to sail. After, during the holidays, they had hunted vodyanoy in the Baltic and selkies in the Atlantic. Now, as she tacked down the Fife coast against a vicious winter gale, she felt something pull her towards Spain and the Mediterranean beyond.

Luna gave up using her wand when it became apparent that was how the snatchers were tracking her along the Mediterranean. It was summer now and tourists were easy to steal from, paying no attention to the dreamy girl who brushed against them in narrow streets. She learnt how to exchange the stolen money for the currencies of the ports she passed through. She learnt how to use the money in Muggle supermarkets. When the sea was calm, she fished for red mullet and sea bream. Once, she caught a sword fish and the steaks fed her for a week.

It was at the Pyramids that she had her first breakthrough. She had come more as a tourist than out of any real hope of finding Harry. The location potion, when she brewed it in Alexandria with her second to last strand of Harry’s hair, gave her the certainty that Harry was still alive, not in this world and further away than ever. Still, she had come too far not to see something in the way of Egyptian ruins. Dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, chino shorts, socks and sandals with a camera round her neck and a line of sun cream along her nose, she went to Cairo and rode a tightly packed tram to the Pyramids. She was focusing her camera on the Sphinx when it came to her: the location magic was not determining a destination but rather a riddle.

She took the train back to Alexandria that evening and turned her boat towards Europe. As Cleopatra’s needle disappeared into the haze, she turned her mind to the riddle. Harry was always moving, circling not in this world but never closer than at Hogwarts. The answer came to her in a dream that night.

Luna gave up her father's boat when an Auror nearly captured her at Santander. She stabbed the Auror in a dark side street and left the body on the boat when she sunk it in the Bay of Biscay. Months later, in a pavement cafe in Toulouse, she read in _Le Monde_ of the near-certain demise of a Lovegood, the corpse too rotted to be identified. Luna folded the paper with a small smile, signalling to the waiter for another 1664.

After that, she was not followed. She made her way by train to Calais and there, to avoid Muggle passport control and any Aurors’ monitoring entry to Britain, she stole a small sailing boat and crossed the Channel in the thin light of an English summer’s night. The White Cliffs of Dover, coloured red by the dawn light, appeared more a warning than a welcome. Leaving the boat beached somewhere along the flinty Kent coast, she walked until she found a train station.

The Muggle areas she passed through showed no signs that Voldemort had increased his power in the year and a half she had been away. She rode the train to Edinburgh and there, in the second hand book shops and austere libraries that littered the city, she hunted for the information she needed. When she had the necessary information she bought supplies: an iron crowbar from B&Q, herbs from a Muggle garden centre, and a sprig of Rowan from the Botanical Gardens.

It was only when she reached Hogsmeade, with its boarded up shops and bombed out buildings, that the war she had run from was visible. On a ruin that might once have been Zonko’s a ragged poster read ‘RESIST’ over a photograph of Harry. She crept through the Forbidden Forest, passing through the Hogwarts’ wards with a shudder. She searched for hours and, under the light of the full moon, she found it: a perfect circle of mushrooms, high on the rise of a hill, Hogwarts visible below.

Luna walked round the circle nine times, hearing the high pitched laughter of fairies and the deeper laughter of a human boy. After the ninth rotation, she stopped and stepped back. She threw the herbs and the Rowan into the circle and then thrust the crowbar inside, swinging it back and forth. Nothing happened. Luna sat back on the warm, rough heather. Behind her, someone cleared their throat.

“Professor Firenze,” Luna said, without turning round.

“Ms Lovegood. You found the fairy ring.”

“Yes. But I cannot free Harry. What did I do wrong, Professor?”

“The stars, Ms Lovegood. They are not in the right position.”

“Ah, none of the books said that was necessary.”

“No, but it has been more than a year. After that marker, the fairy realm tightens their grip. It is only at certain points that the membrane between our worlds thins.”

“Thank you Professor. I hope you will be with me when I next attempt to free Harry.”

Firenze inclined his head. “I fear, by then, it will be too late for my kind.”

Luna closed her eyes and nodded. “Goodbye then.”

“Goodbye, Ms Lovegood,” Firenze said, turning and walking into the forest. “You should light the herbs next time.”

Luna returned to Edinburgh's libraries and consulted the stars and astrology charts. She worked out the moments when the membrane between the human and fairy world was thinnest. She measured that against Harry’s own star chart.

In the years she had to wait until the stars aligned, Luna wandered, criss-crossing Britain without any apparent pattern. She brewed Polyjuice potion in a bothy on Loch Muick, miles from any human habitation but near an excellent crop of fluxweed. On crisp autumn mornings, she watched herds of deer cross the sky line. Once the potion was brewed, she went to Knockturn Alley, disguised as some nameless Muggle whose hair she had secreted from a hairdresser, and bought a secondhand wand.

Now armed, she went to far flung Order safe houses, staking them out for days before daring to breach the wards. She collected the newspapers and letters left there. She ate the food kept fresh under statis spells. In a small mansion deep in the Norfolk fens, she accidentally tripped a spell and a lone Auror came. Luna killed him and pocketed his wand. In North Wales, she spotted Mundungus Fletcher, drinking whisky in the sitting room of a two-up, two-down house. She apparated away.

After that scare, she decided to go Muggle.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: graphic descriptions of violence and executions.

The Triwizard Tournament was won. A champion died. Summer gave way to autumn and the students returned. Quidditch matches were won and lost. Snow fell. Exams were passed and failed. A Headmaster died. A battle was waged and the Dark Mark rose over Hogwarts. A headmaster resigned. Through all these rapid changes, deep in the Forbidden Forest, Harry danced.

After the war, students returned to Hogwarts. Each September, as summer gave way to autumn, the students returned. Quidditch matches were won and lost. Some years, snow fell. Exams were passed and failed. Each July, the students left for the holidays and the grounds fell silent in the muggy damp of a Scottish summer. Oblivious to the rhythm of the seasons, Harry danced on.

Harry danced until the stars aligned. A burning clump of herbs and twigs landed in front of him. A crowbar thumped him hard in his ribs. And he fell.

He blinked stupidly, taking in the thin covering of muddy snow on the ground and the dark silhouette of the Castle. He straightened his glasses and pushed himself up. There was a woman with long blonde hair stood by a pine tree watching him. She was vaguely familiar, perhaps a fellow student’s mother he had glimpsed at Platform Nine and Three Quarters. 

“Is the Ball over yet?” he asked her, levering himself up onto his shaking legs and brushing snow off his dress robes.

“Yes Harry,” the woman said, walking closer to him. “It has been over for quite a long time.”

She was wearing a worn duffel coat over an arran jumper several sizes too large and paint stained jeans. There was a crowbar dangling loosely in her right hand. “Who are you?” Harry asked.

“Luna. We went to school together.”

“School? But you’re ancient,” he said, taking a step back before the woman caught his arm and pulled him back. 

“Careful,” she said, “I had enough trouble getting you out the first time.” 

Harry turned and looked at the faint circle of grass showing through the snow behind him. A bundle of herbs and twigs smoked weakly in the middle of it. “What is that?”

“Fairy ring,” Luna said. 

“Ah, and the burning stuff?”

“Wild herbs,” Luna said, fixing him with unfocused grey eyes. “Rowan for the cross Jesus died on.”

“Well,” Harry said, gesturing at the dark castle, “I should go. It looks like I’m out after curfew.”

“You can’t go up there, Harry. It’s been over run.”

“By who? Not Volde-.” Before he could finish Luna clapped a hand over his mouth. 

“You cannot speak his name.”

Harry shook his head free. “I’m not scared of Volde-.”

Luna bashed him in the shin with the crowbar. Harry fell to the ground with a wounded howl. “What the fuck was that for?”

“I read a story of a man who came out of a fairy ring and disintegrated into dust when he was hit by a stick.” She reached down and helped him up again. “Maybe you weren’t in there long enough.”

“I was barely in there,” Harry scowled, rubbing his shin. “And you’d already touched me.”

“Twenty years,” she said, turning away. “More than, twenty-three, twenty-four.”

Harry gaped, looking from the dark castle to the fairy ring to Luna walking away from Hogwarts. “What year is it?”

“2017.”

He pulled out his wand and pointed it with a trembling hand at Luna’s back. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I wouldn’t use your wand,” she said, walking deeper into the forest. “You’ll be snatched.”

Harry rubbed his hair, still greasy with Sleekeazy's Hair Potion, and limped after her. “Why are you here? Why not Ron and Hermione. Or Dumbledore?”

She turned and caught his hand. “Soon, I’ll tell you soon.” 

Harry had the sensation of being squeezed through a rubber tube and then all was darkness. 

* * *

About an hour after Luna apparated Harry from the edge of Hogwarts’ wards, a dark figure appeared near the same place. They strode into the forest, following the foot steps in the grimy snow, until they reached they fairy ring. They circled the ring nine times and then stepped back with a snarl. The clearing lit up with diagnostic spells. The figure fished out the tangle of partially burnt plants and twigs from the centre with their staff and sniffed it. Eventually, when the clearing had given up its meagre secrets, the figure stalked back the way they had come. 

* * *

Luna looked down at the passed out boy. Outwardly, he had not aged a day from the weedy, messy haired Fourth Year who had last been seen dancing with Patil at the Yule Ball. His dress robes were new but outdated even to her eyes. The only noticeable change was his scar, now raised and an angry red. 

She bent down to pick Harry up under the armpit, dragging him out of the Celtic stone circle she had chosen for its remoteness and large car park. Her battered Morris Minor, moss growing on push down roof and rusty hubcaps, was parked by the information board. Humming softly, she levered Harry into the passenger seat and did up his seat belt. 

She drove to the coast with the radio on, Christmas carols playing. Harry slept, his feet tapping in time to the music. Dawn broke behind them and caught the frost in the fields and the snow banked under hedgerows. She braked hard to avoid a dozy looking pheasant wandering the road. The bird flapped clumsily into the air with a squawk.

“What?” Harry said, waking with a gasp. 

“There’s a calming draught in the glove compartment,” Luna said conversationally.

Harry scrabbled for it. “Are you kidnapping me?”

“No, Harry. I thought you could use a holiday.”

“Where am I?”

“Near Oban.”

He downed the egg blue potion. Gradually, his feet stopped twitching along to 'Last Christmas' playing over the car’s speakers. They were on the hill down to Oban, the sea beyond clear and wide, stretching out to the harr blurred Outer Hebrides. Harry’s mind was full of so many questions he had no idea which one to ask first. When Luna pulled into the car park at the ferry terminus, parking between two sleek cars that were far more modern than hers, Harry stumbled after her wordlessly. Luna opened the boot and handed Harry a large red anorak. He pulled it over his dress robes and they walked in Oban. At the foot of the High Street, a group of teenage Muggles stood, their clothes more fitted than Harry remembered the fashion being in his last summer at Privet Drive. The boys favoured haircuts short at the sides and long at the top. Harry stared but they did not look up from prodding the small flat tablets in their hands. Luna entered a small newsagent and began talking to the man behind the counter. Harry stood in front of the newspapers, picking up _The Times_ (which was smaller than he remembered) and staring at the date on the front cover. “It really is 2017,” he muttered. 

Luna took the paper gently from his hands. “I’m not buying that Murdoch rag,” she said, picking up the _Guardian_ and the _Free Press_. 

Harry followed her dumbly to the till. The chocolate bar selection was more or less as he remembered it. The prices were not. He picked up a Twix. “I remember when these cost 25p,” he said. 

The man behind the counter laughed. “Very funny, young man.”

Luna paid for the newspapers and the Twix. She bought coffee from a small hut in the harbour and they sat watching as a Cal Mac ferry chugged slowly into port. Harry leafed through the _Guardian_ and chewed on a Twix finger as he tried to decide which question to ask first. 

“What’s Brexit?” he asked at last.

* * *

Harry and Luna were on the last ferry to Barra on Christmas Eve. They were surrounded by men and women travelling home to the far flung islands on which they had been born. The islanders sang mournful songs in Gaelic as old as the hills and dour Victorian Christmas carols. 

The voyage was eight hours long and Harry got answers to most of his questions. Harry had not been seen since the Yule Ball. Cedric had won the Triwizard Tournament and disappeared. That night, Voldemort had risen from the dead. Cedric’s corpse with a cut in his arm had been found in the Little Hangleton graveyard. Sirius had died a year later in a fight against the Death Eaters at the Ministry. Dumbledore the year after that, murdered at close range by Snape. Hogwarts had fallen to the Death Eaters. The Ministry was under Voldemort’s control. The Order, without a figurehead, had stuttered and disintegrated. She told him what she knew of Voldemort’s changes to the wizarding world. There was a trace on Voldemort’s name and on certain wands that would bring the snatchers. She told him of Muggle-born witches and wizards taken from their homes and their parents obliviated. Luna would not answer questions about what had happened to the wizarding world after she had fled on the boat.

“You just left?” Harry asked. 

“I had to find you,” Luna said. “That was more important.”

“Why you?” Harry stood up. “I never even spoke to you at school. Why not my friends? The Order? Why did they not find me?”

“It was fated.”

Harry scoffed. “Why did it take you so long then?”

“The stars had to align.”

At that, Harry limped bow-legged out onto the deck. Luna went to the bar where a ginger woman was singing “A Parting Glass” as a man played the fiddle with closed eyes and expressive mouth. She ordered two beers and a packet of cheese and onion crisps, carrying them out to the deck. The back deck was deserted, the wind rushing hard from the east. Luna climbed the stairs to the top deck and found Harry sat on a plastic seat near the front. “Here,” she said, handing him a plastic pint glass of Duechers. 

“I’m underage,” Harry said, managing a faint smile. 

“I thought you were born in 1980.” Luna sat down next to him, her hair blowing wildly out in the wind. 

Harry sipped the beer and pulled a face. “It’s not butter beer.”

“It tastes of heather.”

“If you say so,” Harry said, shoving crisps into his mouth and drinking the beer through them.

They sat in silence, watching the deep blue of the twilight give way to darkness. The stars brightened and Jupiter glinted. Harry fell asleep, the last inch of beer in his pint glass slopping onto his anorak, his feet moving to the sound of an accordion playing below. 

* * *

Harry did not see much of Luna’s house on Christmas Eve. All he knew was that it was a small white cottage at the end of a long, bumpy drive and that the fold out bed was extremely comfortable. 

He woke to bright sunshine and stretched. His legs ached something awful and the hard skin on the soles of his feet itched. He limped stiffly to the window and looked out onto the most perfect beach he had ever seen. The sand was almost white, the water started off aquamarine in the shallows and deepened to the blue of last night’s twilight. Luna was swimming about fifty metres out and Harry walked out, still wearing the dress shirt and boxers in which he had slept. Harry stepped into the water, hissing at the cold. Luna looked at him and swam towards shore and stood when she reached the shallows. She was naked and Harry dropped his gaze embarrassedly. 

“You said you’d tell me about my friends,” Harry said.

Luna wrapped a towel round her body. “After breakfast.”

Harry nodded and followed her back inside, slumping on the sofa. 

Luna came back in dressed in a round neck jumper that was unraveling at the sleeves. “Coffee?”

“Black, thanks.” Harry sat at the dining table. "Do people often get trapped in fairy rings?"

"Muggles mostly." Luna set a mug of coffee and a bowl of porridge in front of him. “Do you know who put you in there?”

Harry shrugged. “I just remember seeing a cloaked figure and following them out of the rose garden. Then dancing with the fairies for a few minutes. Then you.”

She hummed.

After breakfast, Luna led him to a stone outbuilding. There were piles of newspapers, separated by title. Some were Muggle but, in the back, Harry could see moving pictures. 

“You don’t have to read them all at once,” Luna said before she left. 

Harry scanned the wizarding titles. The largest pile was the _Daily Prophet_ followed by the _Quibbler_. Beside them were a stack of miscellaneous magazines like _Which Broomstick?_ and several more of _Witch Weekly_. Harry ignored the magazines and started with the _Prophet_. Some of the pieces in the pile were clippings, torn where they had been pinned to walls. Others were the full paper, down to the radio guide. The collection started soon after his disappearance. Harry read about how Cedric’s death was explained away as an accident. He read of Ministry reforms at Hogwarts and how Dumbledore was increasingly cast as mad. A paper from June 1996 displayed a picture of a snake-like man standing in the atrium of the Ministry. “Voldemort Returns!” read the title. It took another year and Dumbledore’s death for Voldemort to actually claim the Ministry. Harry grimaced at the news that Snape had been made headmaster at Hogwarts. The other reforms enacted by Voldemort were somehow worse. Harry imagined the horror of children being taken from loving parents, brought into a world where their blood was thought impure. 

If reading the list of the dead from the Battle for Hogwarts was brutal, it was nothing compared to the clippings that followed. There was a moving picture of Hagrid’s execution. He was stood on a box, a noose round his neck, the end of the robe tied to a limb of the stilled Whomping Willow. And then the tree moved and the life was jerked out of Hagrid. Harry grimaced and flipped over the paper. He was faced with an image of Fred and George with their tongues torn out. He continued down the pile, barely registering the death of Professor McGonagall, until he reached an image of Ron, taller than when Harry had last seen him and with a scruffy beard, being struck by an Avada Kedavra curse while tied to a post. Harry watched him die over and over again, tears dripping onto the font page of the _Prophet_. Harry was tempted to run away and find Luna and sob into her shoulder but he kept flipping through the newspapers until he found Hermione's name. She had died in a solo attack against the Muggle-Born Registration Commission, taking four members of staff with her and grievously injuring the department head. Harry dropped the paper and walked unsteadily outside to vomit up his porridge. 

“Everyone I love is dead,” he said dully to Luna when he finally found the strength to enter the cottage.

She stood up and wrapped him in a hug that Harry took a long time to return. Then she went to the fridge and pulled out two bottles of beer and handed Harry one. “It will get easier.”

Harry gave a hollow laugh. “I want to slit the snake faced bastard from ear to ear.”

“That’s a start,” Luna said.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: ableist slurs and child abduction.

Theodore Nott rubbed his eyes and looked blearily at the huge map of Britain hanging on the office wall. The map was covered with flares of colour marking the use of magic over the last twenty-four hours. Most followed the usual pattern. There was a bright red heat over London and smaller ones over wizarding communities in Godric’s Hollow and Hogsmeade. There were two sickly yellow spots of accidental magic in North Belfast and outside of Birmingham. 

It was the small red spot near the Bridge of Orchy that was giving him a headache. These obscure spots of magic popped up twice a year or so, usually overnight and within a radius of about fifty miles. The wand used had no trace on it, which was not especially unusual. No, the points were unusual because, as far as he knew, no magical families lived in the area. There were the McKinnons in Sutherland and an obscure branch of the MacDougal family in Skye but that part of the coast was devoid of registered magic families. Besides, there was never any other spots of magic anywhere in the area. Just, twice a year or so, two spots somewhere in that fifty mile radius. He was almost certain by now that these were apparition flares. He had first started researching the points about a decade ago, after most of the escaped rebels had been crossed off his list. Since then he had painstakingly visited each flare point. They had led him to Medieval castles, lochside beauty spots, and a Jacobite memorial. He remained unsure if the person he was following was an undesirable or a Scottish history fanatic. “I wonder what they were visiting this time,” he mumbled to himself, shoving the file, his camera and shrunken broom into a bag. 

Theodore was an Auror in the missing wizards and witches department. Most of his colleagues spent their days chasing down wayward adolescents who had wandered into enchanted forests or Muggle kids who exploded with accidental magic. Theodore worked the cold cases. He liked the work. No one expected breakthroughs. He aimed for two clearances a year and usually hit that target. This year, Theodore had only crossed off one name from his list. Following a tip-off from his contact at Scotland Yard, he had found the rotted corpse of Seamus Finnigan next to a pile of Muggle pills in a seedy bedsit in Brighton. The body was near mummified, the _Daily Prophet_ on the kitchen counter almost seven years old. Theodore had cast the necessary preserving spells, transferred the body and contents of the room to the evidence room at headquarters before stumbling out into the dirty street to vomit. It horrified him that Finnigan could lie there undisturbed for years, that Muggles could blithely leave a man to rot like that. But the note on Finnigan’s bedside table had horrified him more: “NO HOPE” scrawled in blue Muggle ink. 

Still, that left Theodore needed another success in the next week to keep up his two person record. Theodore had been careful to never be too successful at his job. He did not want promotion. Equally, he did not want to bring attention to himself for declining standards. The missing persons list was nearly clear of undesirables from the war. Mundungus Fletcher was the last major figure at large. The most recent sighting had been at a flea market in Coventry, where he had been trying to sell cursed Black heirlooms to unsuspecting Muggles. The eyewitness accounts had yielded no clues of Fletcher's current whereabouts before Theodore had obliviated everyone involved. Theodore doubted the man would resurface before New Year.

There was always that pureblood witch who had disappeared in 1941. Several years ago, when he already had his two cold cases solved for the year, Theodore had found her skeleton in the garden of what had been her lover’s house in Muggle London. She had, he suspected, been killed during the Blitz. He had saved her for a year like this one. She had no family left alive, just a long forgotten name, casualty of a long past Muggle war. She would wait until next week if necessary.

In the corridor, a small child wearing a t-shirt with a hedgehog on it was sat bawling silently, wriggling frantically to try and escape the sticking charm keeping them in place. Theodore looked down at it with disgust. “Poor little mite exploded a Christmas tree when he didn’t get the gift he wanted,” Bletchley said from the doorway of her office. 

“Belfast or Birmingham?” Theodore asked.

“Birmingham. The Belfast Mudblood started levitating herself in the middle of a Nativity play. Bole’s going to be obliviating for weeks.”

On cue, Bole pushed open the door to the department, pulling a small girl dressed in an angel costume along behind him. She was even younger than hedgehog boy but her face was stoic, the red mark of a handprint on her cheek. “What is it about Christmas that brings all the twatting Mudbloods out of the woodwork?” Bole moaned, shoving the girl into the seat next to hedgehog boy. 

“What’s a Mudblood?” the girl asked in a harsh Northern Irish accent, straightening her tin-foil wings.

“Silencio,” Bletchley said lazily. “Epoximise.”

The girl opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, tried and failed to stand up, and then gave up with a shrug. “I suppose I’d better do the bloody paper work,” Bole said, turning into his office. “I had to obliviate fifty-seven of those spastics.”

“Off to cross off another name, Nott?” Bletchley asked him, nodding at the list in his hand.

“Hopefully,” Theodore said with a thin smile and continued to the floo. Of course, Harry Potter remained top of that list. But no one, least of all himself, expected Theodore Nott to have any success there. 

* * *

Theodore looked round the stone circle resignedly. It was empty bar a pair of bedraggled looking sheep sheltering from the brisk wind behind a menhir. He took their photo and a couple of the car park. Then he apparated to London, late for a meeting with the Muggle police. 

Theodore liked Scotland Yard. The corridors were straight, the rooms clearly labelled, the lifts cooperative. There were rarely any children sat in the corridors. He knocked on Chief-Inspector Hornby’s office door. 

“Enter.”

The corner office had a view across London that made Theodore almost appreciate Muggles.

“Coffee, Captain Nott?”

“Thank you, Chief Inspector.”

Hornby waved away her assistant and placed a handful of files onto the desk. Hornby was a squib, twenty or so years older than Theodore. She was due to retire in a couple of years and Theodore doubted he would find a better informant. “Any luck with Mundungus?” she asked.

“He’s gone to ground,” Theodore said, dropping into a chair. “He’ll resurface when he needs more money for whisky.”

“Where did he even get Black heirlooms?” she asked. 

“Grimmauld Place, I suppose.” Nott scratched the stubble on his chin. “The Ministry’s never been able to breach the wards.”

“And Fletcher is able to?” Hornby said with a scoff. 

“He was a member of the Order. Maybe the wards still recognise him even after Black’s death.”

“What sort of idiot makes a missing teenage boy his heir anyway,” Hornby said. 

The assistant came back in and handed Theodore a mug of the hot brown liquid the Muggle police claimed was coffee. He sniffed it with his eyes closed. It smelt of photocopiers. Hornby dismissed the man and flipped open the first file. “I assume the fire at the foster home in Folkestone was your lot?”

A seven year old had set fire to his mathematics homework. Bole had caught him relatively easily but had not reckoned on the boy’s twin sisters who had stuck Bole to the floor, bit his wand hand and turned his hair blue. By the time Bletchley had turned up and freed him, the fire was too ferocious to put out. When Theodore had trudged into the office after yet another false sighting of Fletcher, he had been faced with the wide eyes of three scrawny children, each with their hair dyed a more lurid shade of green than the last. Bole’s hair had been stuck blue for a week before he finally gave up and shaved it all off, looking like a fresh Death Eater recruit.

“Yes. Bit messy.”

“But no witnesses.” She handed Theodore a copy of the report. The foster parents had perished in the fire. The children were reported missing, presumed dead. 

“Good.”

“Before we move onto the loons, this report from social services might interest you. A social worker responded to a concern about a single mother in Bristol. The child has not been seen in over a year. The mother said the child was suffering from cystic fibrosis which was why he was home schooled. The child seemed healthy enough to the social worker, if a little sleep deprived and quiet.” Theodore looked up from the report, wondering what a cherubic looking blonde boy called Euan Jones had to do with him. “I mention it only because there was that huge blow-up of accidental magic in Bristol a year ago your office was unable to trace.”

“Ah, yes. Not Bletchley and Bole’s finest moment,” Theodore said with a faint grimace. The pair had spent a month undercover as bin men, growing increasingly frustrated, waiting for another accidental outburst that never came. In the end, Bole had levitated a Muggle who was complaining about fortnightly bin collection into the jaws of their dustbin lorry and they had been recalled. 

Hornby smiled fondly. “Can those two do anything right?”

“Doubtful,” Theodore said, tapping the picture of Euan Jones. “I’ll check the boy out.”

Hornby ran through the rest of her list. A few broom sightings, a potion explosion in Milton Keynes, and a possible baby dragon in the Cairngorms. Theodore finished his coffee, shook Hornby’s hand and left. As soon as he found a quiet alleyway, he apparated to Bristol. There was a small magical community in the city, mainly craftsmen. The smell of butter beer brewing filled his nostrils. Theodore paused in the wizarding area long enough to send an owl with his location to the office that would in all likelihood be ignored for weeks and then set out into the Muggle city. The Jones’ lived in the top floor flat of a vast Victorian house on the hill. Theodore cast a disillusionment charm on himself and settled down on a garden wall to wait. The sky darkened, Muggles in suits hurried home, Christmas presents tucked under their arms, and the lights in the houses came on. Theodore noted with interest that someone closed the curtains of the Jones' flat before turning on the lights. He took out his wallet and pulled out a blank identity card. A few taps of his wand and it stated that he was Philip Jeffries, social worker for Bristol Council. He walked up four flights of stairs, pausing to catch his breath on the top floor. He knocked on the door. A woman opened it, the chain on the door. “Social services,” Theodore said smoothly, holding out the card.

Her face fell but she undid the chain and opened the door. “I suppose you had better come in.”

Theodore stepped into the flat and was hit by a wall of dense numbness. It felt like the air had been knocked out of him and he failed to suppress a wince. Luckily the woman had already turned her back. 

“Has there been another complaint?” she asked, leading the way into a living room with a plastic Christmas tree in the corner. “I did explain about Euan’s illness.”

There was a child sat on the rug, looking as wan as Theodore felt. “Oh no Miss Jones. There is no further issue with your parenting. I have been sent to check up on how my colleague treated you. Was she polite?”

Theodore nodded along to her answer, pretending to listen while watching the listless child. The wards were magic suppressors he guessed. The woman was a Muggle and immune but for the child, the oppressive wards must have felt akin to torture. Theodore would have felt angry if he was not concentrating hard on just remembering to breathe. He asked Jones a few more questions and then stood to leave. Accidental magic was not his territory. He would get out of this awful house and leave Bole and Bletchley to work out how to extract this child without magic. They could raise it to the foundations for all he cared. 

There was a sound in the hallway behind Theodore. Jones turned her head to the door and smiled. “Oh darling, you’re here. The social worker was just leaving.”

“Social worker? They shouldn’t have been able to get in here,” said a voice behind Theodore.

Theodore turned and his eyes widened. “Finch-Fletchley.”

The next moment, Finch-Fletchley had thrown a bouquet of flowers to one side and tackled Theodore to the floor. Theodore was skinny and gangly while Finch-Fletchley was broad shouldered and thick chested. But Theodore had fought in the War while Finch-Fletchley had hidden in a Kensington flat for the duration. Theodore was an Auror on active duty while Finch-Fletchley held the post of Minister for Muggle Trade Relations at the Ministry. It was not an equal fight. Theodore reached out an arm, grabbed the fire poker and whacked Finch-Fletchley over the head with it. He pushed the dazed man off him and picked up the limp child roughly, crossing to the window. The woman was screaming but Theodore ignored her and turned to Finch-Fletchley who was gingerly sitting up, his eyes unfocused. 

“Lift the ward, or I chuck your half-breed brat out the window.”

“Come on Theo,” Finch-Fletchley said, touching the bump on his head gingerly. “Let us go. We’ll run. You’ll never see us again.”

“Lift the fucking ward,” Theodore near screeched.

“I can pay you Theo. Money is no object.” 

Theodore grasped the child by its collar and pulled open the window with his free hand. The cool night air did nothing to lessen his feeling of being squashed flat by the wards. “Final warning, Finch-Fletchley.”

“Okay,okay,” Finch-Fletchley said as Theodore shoved the child out onto the ledge. “I’m reaching into pocket for my wand.”

Finch-Fletchley made a series of complicated wand movements and the pressure was gone. Before the man could try anything, Theodore conjured ropes wordlessly, wrapping them round Finch-Fletchley and his mistress. The child began to cry. Theodore hauled it back inside, held it above his head and dropped it. The woman squealed but Finch-Fletchley looked resigned as the child magically cushioned its own fall. Theodore slumped against the wall, knowing that a sickly yellow spot would bring Bole and Bletchley to his rescue. He only hoped they would move fast. 

* * *

It was gone two in the morning by the time Theodore made it back to the MisWiz office, tugging Finch-Fletchty’s sleepy half-blood bastard behind him. Bole and Bletchley had turned up two hours after Theodore had forced accidental magic from the child. Theodore had been forced to silence Finch-Fletchley to stop him trying to bargain his way out and was almost resigned to watching him overnight when Bletchley had appeared looking pissed off. She had brightened when she took in Theodore slumped against the wall and a bright pink Finch-Fletchly, yelling silent obscenities. “Oh this is way above our pay grade,” she said with a happy grin. “I’m going to fetch the boss, Nott.”

Bole arrived minutes after her, holding a half empty bottle of Fire Whisky. He whistled. “Is the kid Bitch-Cuntly’s?” he asked Theodore. 

“Apparently,” Theodore said tiredly. 

Bole bared his teeth and kicked Finch-Fletchley’s shins. “Fucking blood traitor scum. Couldn’t keep your knob in your pants? A Greengrass wife not enough for you? Do you know how long it’s been since anyone was stupid enough to try and hide a Mudblood from us?”

Theodore thought Finch-Fletchley was probably safe enough under Bole’s care and went into the kitchen to find something to feed the screaming child. Fifteen minutes later, Bletchley returned with what looked like half the Auror department. 

Amelia Runcorn, the head of the Auror department cornered Theodore in the kitchen and made him recount exactly what had happened. The child curled up in his lap and slept while Theodore explained about the magical suppressing wards. Runcorn pulled a face. “How barbaric. I suppose that’s what happens when you give Mudbloods a second chance. Good work Nott. We’ll take Finch-Fletchley from here. You deal with the half-breed.”

Theodore had his account taken twice more, making sure to credit to his source at the Met, before he was finally given permission to leave. He tried to foist the child onto Bole and Bletchley. But Bletchley claimed she had to follow up on a case in Cornwall and Bole announced he was technically off duty and only here for the fun bits.

Theodore apparated away from the flat with a feeling of relief that even the sticky child holding his hand could not dent. Leaving the child in his office with a Muggle hole punch to entertain it, he went to make coffee. He spooned Nescafe into his Montrose Magpies mug and poured hot water over the grains. He sniffed the brown liquid. It smelt almost like coffee. Theodore sighed. Even with an O in his Potion NEWT, he could not replicate the delicate photocopier taste of that brewed in Scotland Yard. He would have to wheedle the secret out of Hornby at their next meeting.

He unlocked and opened the door to his office and nearly dropped his mug. “My Lord,” he said, bowing from the waist.

“Theodore Nott,” the Dark Lord said, sat in Theodore’s chair and petting the child’s head as it battered away at the hole punch. “So this is where you hide yourself.”

“To serve you, my Lord,” Theodore said uncertainly. 

“I reward loyalty, Theodore. Today you discovered a blood traitor in my Government. You served me faithfully during the war and your father served me before that.” The Dark Lord looked directly up at him. “Tell me, to which department would you be promoted?” 

Theodore swallowed and set down his mug before he spilt it down his shirt. He had not been this close to the Dark Lord since the Battle of Hogwarts. His father had once told Theodore how the man had looked when he was reborn in the Little Hangleton Graveyard. Theodore had seen that form when he fought in the War. It was hard to reconcile that skeleton with the man sat in front of him, a face that had probably looked haughty in his youth, now softened by wrinkles round the eyes and hair that was beginning to grey. His immaculate dress robes made Theodore embarrassed of his Muggle disguise. If not for the blood red of the man’s eyes, Theodore might have relaxed. “Truthfully, my Lord, I am happy here.”

“I do hate wasted talent, Theodore.” The Dark Lord flipped open a report. “You have cleared precisely two cases a year for the last seven years. Judging from your file alone, I would take you for a mediocre wizard.” He looked up at Theodore again with a gaze that was more disappointed than angry. “Even before your actions tonight, we both know that is not true.”

Theodore slumped. “No, my Lord. Send me to where I would be of most use.”

The child took that moment to punch a hole in the Dark Lord’s robes. Theodore froze in horror as the Dark Lord bent down and picked it up. “My, my, concealing dangerous Muggle artifacts as well, Theodore,” he said, prying the hole punch gently from the child’s fingers. 

“It is useful for my work with the police, my Lord.”

The Dark Lord paid him no attention, an amused look crossing his face as the child curled against his chest and started sucking its thumb. “How old is he?”

Theodore picked the social worker’s report off the table and flicked through the pages. “DOB 31 July 2010,” he read out. “So it’s seven, my Lord.”

Theodore could have sworn the man stiffened but the next moment he was carding his long, thin fingers through the child’s hair. “Forgive me Theodore, you are obviously still in shock after this evening’s events. Do you have any Fire Whisky? I believe most Aurors keep a bottle close at hand.”

“No my Lord. But Sergeant Bole will have some.” The Dark Lord gave a dismissive wave of his hand. Theodore stumbled out the door and opened Bole’s office with a Second Year unlocking charm. He opened the bottom desk drawer. There were three bottles of Fire Whisky, two empty and one half empty. He picked up the half empty bottle and rinsed out two mismatched glasses in the staff room. The Dark Lord had set a magic measurer spinning when Theodore reentered his office. It was glowing almost gold as it whistled piercingly. “The child’s?” Theodore asked as he poured three fingers of whisky into each glass. 

“Yes,” the Dark Lord almost whispered, reaching for a glass. “He is unexpectedly strong for a half-blood.” 

“It could be the wards he was kept under, my Lord. The suppressor could mean his magic built up.”

“Maybe.” The Dark Lord’s eyes narrowed. “I would string the man up myself if it were possible.”

Theodore shuddered and downed his whisky. “It was bad enough being under those wards for half an hour. Let alone seven years. Little wonder the child does not speak.”

The Dark Lord reached across for the bottle and refilled both their glasses. “When was the last time a true half-blood was born in Britain?”

Theodore took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “The girl Weasley was with child by a Moroccan Muggle when we captured her. That must have been over fifteen years ago, My Lord.”

“When you captured her,” the Dark Lord corrected with a stern look. “Her boy is doing rather well at Hogwarts. A Ravenclaw prefect, I believe.”

“Imagine,” Theodore said with a snort, “a Weasley not sorted into Gryffindor.”

“Quite.” The Dark Lord gave a half smile, pushing the child’s hair off its forehead. “The first half blood born in nearly a decade. I think I will keep him.”

Theodore’s mouth fell open before he remembered who was sat opposite him. “Yes, my Lord.”

“I will get the paperwork to you tomorrow.” The man stood, cradling the now sleeping child gently. “Oh, and Captain Nott?”

“Yes my Lord?”

“You have a year to find Mundungus Fletcher,” he said, sweeping out of the office. “Or I will promote you to Deputy Head Auror in a special public ceremony.”

As soon as the door closed, Theodore emptied the remainder of Bole’s whisky into his glass.


	5. Chapter 5

Harry and Luna did little and saw few people in the first few months they lived together in the cottage. Luna swam in the mornings and painted in the six hours of light that a Hebridean winter offered. Harry read all the newspapers and magazines Luna had archived through twice over and then moved onto her meagre collection of magic books. 

One night, a storm washed up a crate containing Famous Grouse. Luna found it the next morning and called to Harry. “Just like _Whisky Galore_ ,” she said.

“What?” Harry asked sleepily.

Luna shook her head and dragged him inside, throwing a beaten up paperback at him. Harry slumped on the sofa and read the Muggle novel as Luna carried the unbroken bottles of whisky into the house. After that, for lack of anything else to do, Harry devoured the novels on Luna’s shelf, working his way through the classic novels before moving onto the Muggle history books on the bottom shelf. 

When the days lengthened and Harry got restless, Luna drove them around the islands in the evenings. They drove through old fishing villages full of squat buildings and empty harbours. As they sat in a car park overlooking a deserted beach on South Uist, Harry tried asking Luna about what she knew of the current state of the wizarding world but she shrugged. “I wouldn't know. I’ve been Muggling along for the last decade.”

He did not try again until the sea was warm enough for him to swim in. Harry floated in the shallows, solidifying his thoughts, half remembering an absurd dream he had had the previous night of a man with Voldemort's voice tucking a small child into bed. He waded out of the water, pushing his wet hair off his forehead. He found Luna in the kitchen. “I have to go to London.”

She nodded. “After midsummer. There’s an exhibition I want to see at the Tate.”

* * *

Theodore was contentedly bored. He had been staking out a carpet store in Glasgow for ten days, ostensibly hoping for a sighting of Ali Bashir. The case had landed on his desk in February. Two years ago, Bashir had sold a flying carpet to one of the Greengrasses but had neglected to put nonflammable spells on the item. A cinder falling out of a grate was all it took for the entire west wing of Greengrass Grove to burn down. Bashir had fled, leaving behind a warehouse full of moth eaten carpets and substantial debts. If he had any sense at all, Bashir would have escaped the country on one of his more robust specimens. Theodore dumped the file in his “Almost Impossible” pile and forgotten about it. 

Then, in April, Hornby had scoffingly mentioned an alien sighting in Glasgow during her discussion of the loons. Theodore had got her to pull up the Twitter post. He squinted at the noisy photograph. It could have been a man on a flying carpet. Or it could have been a seagull caught at an awkward angle. It was at the very least a good excuse to get out of the office. The Bristol case had brought him too much attention. Runcorn was talking about promoting him to management. The _Prophet_ was running near daily stories naming him in the run up to Finch-Fletchley’s trial for miscegenation and concealing a magical minor. Rita Skeeter had turned up in the staff room, asking for an interview. When Theodore refused, she had run with an exclusive about Aurors’ smuggling Nescafe into the Ministry from Muggle London. Bletchley was annoyed at him for getting her coffee confiscated. Bole was annoyed at him for drinking his whisky. The trial was slated to begin on Monday and he fully intended to hide in this Glasgow cafe wearing his excellent disguise until then.

Theodore tried not to think about his visit from the Dark Lord. The report on Euan Jones had arrived in his in tray the next morning, recording a malnourished body and overpowered magic. Theodore strongly suspected the Dark Lord had written it himself. He tried not to think about what the Dark Lord was doing with the child.

He thought instead about Mundungus Fletcher. There had been no recent sightings. He had asked Hornby to keep an eye out for information on the Scottish Highlands but he strongly doubted Fletcher frequented tourist spots with dark artifacts. Theodore was half considering whether it was worth pitting himself against the two-hundred year old Black wards protecting Grimmauld Place in the hope of tracking him down. He decided he would save that Kamikaze mission for December. 

He wrote another clue in the _Herald’s_ crossword and sipped his coffee. It tasted nutty and bitter and nothing like photocopiers. He squinted at a man exiting the carpet store with a rolled up rug over his should and swore, dropping the paper onto the cafe table and fumbling for his jacket. Bashir walked slowly down Sauchiehall Street, humming tunelessly. Theodore followed at a respectable distance, holding his wand tightly in his pocket, inwardly cursing the man for not fleeing to Persepolis. As soon as Bashir turned down a side street, Theodore strode forward, gripped the man’s arm and apparated them away with a dull pop. 

* * *

Luna sat in her car at Glencoe. She downed a bottle of Polyjuice potion with a grimace and felt her body grow and sprout appendages. She looked at her reflection in the rear view mirror. The face that looked back was a blonde man with a chiselled jaw and thick eyebrows. Luna fingered her Adam’s apple then gripped her penis. “Weird,” she muttered, picking up Harry’s dress robes and walking into a field to apparate. 

Hogsmeade had and had not changed since she was last there twenty years ago. The ruined Zonko’s had gone, replaced with an austere shop which sold traditional wizarding hats. Others, like the bookshop were outwardly unchanged but had a display pamphlets on Pureblood breeding and the inferiority of Muggleborn magic in the window. The Hogwarts’ students Luna walked past were dressed like soldiers but still acted like children. They pulled pranks or talked about holiday plans or worried how to get served in the Three Broomsticks. One, heatedly discussing the unfairness of the OWL potions examination, could almost have been taken for a Weasley but for his dark skin. Luna’s shoulders relaxed half an inch. Maybe they were not yet wholly lost.

Luna strode into the robe shop. Along the walls, uniforms for the different schools were displayed. A sales assistant stepped from out the back of the shop. "Can I help, sir?"

"Yes, my son needs a new set of robes for Durmstrang's prize giving. He's managed to destroy all the one's I sent him off with at the start of the year," Luna said, surprised at her gruff voice.

"Fitted or ready made, sir?"

Luna looked up at the racks of ready made uniforms. "Ready made. It'll teach him a lesson."

"Very good," the man said with a faint smirk. "His size?"

Luna reeled off Harry's measurements and the sales assistant pulled a folded Durmstrang uniform from the shelf. "This should fit him, sir."

Luna paid and walked through the streets until she was in the countryside to apparate. It was a relief to sit back to her car and let the Polyjuice potion wear off as she drove back to Oban. The journey on the boat was comfortingly familiar. As she drove slowly down the drive to the cottage, Jupiter glowed in front of her.

“Did you get the stuff?” Harry asked looking up from Gramsci's _Letters from Prison_ as she entered the cottage.

Luna dropped the newspapers and periodicals onto the coffee table. “You’ll need a haircut.”

* * *

Theodore walked out of the interrogation cell, cracking his neck with a groan. It was nearly midnight and he wanted nothing more than a long bath and a large fire whisky. He handed Bashir’s file to a new recruit, her hair still short from training. “Take Bashir down to the cells. He has admitted to selling faulty magical merchandise, ignoring an arrest warrant, unpaid debts, and flying without due care and attention.”

“Yes, Captain,” she said, saluting.

Theodore returned it halfheartedly. He scratched his prickling Dark Mark absentmindedly and shuffled through his notes with a yawn. 

“That was quick work, Theodore,” a familiar voice said behind him. “I am glad to see you have not lost your touch.”

Theodore spun round and bowed, feeling absurdly exposed in his Celtic jersey and torn jeans. “Thank you, my Lord.”

“Come, have a drink with me.”

Theodore knew it was an order rather than a request. “It would be an honour, my Lord.”

“My, almost as good a sycophant as Malfoy,” the Dark Lord said with faint amusement. Theodore followed him past the guards, who went rigid at the man’s approach, and up the stairs to the lifts. “I heard you had made an arrest at a Glasgow market and rather hoped it was Fletcher.”

“I’m afraid Fletcher still eludes me, my Lord.” 

“No sightings?” They stepped into the lift and the Dark Lord pressed the button for the top floor.

“Not since Coventry. Maybe I’ll flush him out by taking an ageing potion and waving a priceless Black heirloom round on the Antiques Roadshow.”

“A most amusing idea, Captain Nott,” the Dark Lord said, placing a hand on the back of Theodore’s neck as he steered him out of the lift. “Although, I doubt Fletcher knows how to operate a television.”

* * *

Harry reached for the _Prophet_. Luna handed him a magazine called _Pure-Blood Boy_ instead. Harry flicked through the glossy publication, looking at the pictures wide eyed. Most of them were of boys his age or older with a buzz cut and dressed in robes that looked like military uniforms. They illustrated useful articles like “Seven Spells to Get your Uniform Sparkling” and “Take the Quiz: Are You Death Eater Material?” He felt his stomach sink as he scanned a photo of one Pulteney Travers, next year’s Hogwarts’ head boy, who was dressed in a robe the colour of dried blood. Harry peered at the photo and noted the Hogwarts’ crest on the boy’s chest. 

“I don’t think much of the current Hogwarts’ uniform,” he said, glowering at the interview with Travers where he stated his ambition was to become a Death Eater.

“I picked up a Durmstrang’s uniform. My transfigaration skills aren’t good enough to form it from your dress robes,” Luna said, opening a catalogue called _Wizarding School: Picking the Right One_.

Harry looked over her shoulder. The Durmstrang uniform had not changed much from the Tournament. He shrugged. “Fine. But you should know, my hair always grows back overnight.”

“No accidental magic,” Luna said, “we’d have to flee and I’ve just finished the four foot beach picture.”

“I’m glad that’s decided,” Harry said, reaching for the _Prophet_. 

* * *

Theodore sat in an armchair in the Member’s Bar feeling woefully under dressed. The Dark Lord had steered him to the table and then strode to the bar without asking Theodore what he wanted to drink. He supposed he should be grateful not to be under the Cruciatus Curse. Theodore looked out over London. The view from here was not as impressive as that at Scotland Yard.

“What on earth are you wearing, Theo?” a snide voice asked behind him. 

“Celtic football shirt. They won the league undefeated last season. Managed by Brendan Rogers. Still looking for a striker as good as Henrik Larson. Any other questions Draco?”

Malfoy smirked. “I suppose what I should have asked was how on earth did you get in here dressed like that?”

“The Dark Lord.”

“Very funny, Theo.”

“If anyone can circumvent the ‘No football colours’ rule, it’s him.”

Malfoy looked ready to deliver another smart retort when suddenly he was bowing at the waist. “My Lord, so good to see you.”

“Ah, likewise Malfoy.” The Dark Lord set down a bottle of red wine and two glasses on the table. “I am afraid I will have to break up this touching scene of two school chums catching up. I have business to discuss with Captain Nott.”

“Of course, my Lord. Theo.”

Theodore failed to keep a smile off his face as Malfoy slouched towards the bar. The Dark Lord handed him a glass of wine. “To solving one of your two yearly cases, Theodore,” the man said raising his glass.

The smile fell off his face as he touched his glass to the Dark Lord’s. “Cheers, my Lord.”

“I think we can drop the titles for the remainder of the evening, Theodore.”

“As you wish,” Theodore said with a faint bow of his head, wondering how idle conversation worked with the Dark Lord. 

“About Finch-Fletchley’s trial.” The Dark Lord was staring out over London. His profile was lit with soft light, the concentration on his face almost endearing. “I want you to leave out your connections to the Met.”

Theodore shifted uncomfortably. “Hornby was the one who made the connection between the accidental magic and the abused kid. I just hit Finch-Fletchley over the head with a poker.”

“And she has been well rewarded,” the Dark Lord said dismissively. “I do not want it widely known that you work with the Muggle Police.”

“Fine. I can say I received an anonymous tip-off about Finch-Fletchley.”

“Very good, Mr Nott” the Dark Lord said, like he was a precocious Hogwarts’ First Year. “The MisWiz Nescafe Smuggling Ring was a big enough scandal.”

Theodore buried his head in his hands with a groan. “You heard about that.”

“It was front page news.”

“Runcorn was furious.”

“Next time, just give the interview to Skeeter if you want to keep secret whatever small perks you get working in that dead end office.”

Theodore hid his smile in his wine glass. “Is the child to be put on the stand?”

“I imagine the testimony of you and the Healer at St Mungo’s will be enough to convict. I intend to bring Euan to the sentencing. If he acts pathetic enough, I have promised to take him to see the Hebridean Black in the Cairngorms.”

“That dragon was real?” Theodore said excitedly, pulling out his notebook. “Wait ‘til I tell Hornby.”

“Maybe if your testimony is exemplary,” the Dark Lord said dryly, “I’ll take you along too Theodore.”

* * *

“What does miscegenation mean?” Harry asked.

Luna tossed a dictionary at him. “Beer?”

“Yeah alright,” Harry answered, flicking through the dictionary. 

Luna went to the fridge and took out two cans of Grolsch, handing one to Harry. “I’m going for a swim.”

Harry was left alone in the sitting room. He blanched at the definition in the dictionary and then flicked through the newspaper, interested in which of his year had evaded death under the new regime. Malfoy and Nott were not surprising. Finch-Fletchley being a Minister was a surprise but his upcoming trial was not. He almost smiled at Hannah Abbott holding the post of Head Mistress at a prep school for magical children. It was the sort of innovation for which Hermione would have campaigned. The Births, Deaths and Marriage page was full of pure blood surnames. He stared in shock at the announcement of the birth of Quintus Weasley to Percy and Penelope Weasley. “Traitor,” Harry snarled, flinging the paper towards the fireplace and striding off towards the bathroom, the can of lager in his hand.

* * *

Theodore apparated carefully to Nott Manor. The Dark Lord had ordered a second bottle of wine and Theodore felt comfortably pissed. He stripped off his Muggle garb and flopped into bed. He called for his house elf and asked for a Mooncalf tongue sandwich and a large glass of water. Sat up in his bed, chewing the sandwich, he tried to work out what he had drunkenly told the Dark Lord that could be used against him.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: racist slurs and mention of child abuse.

They went to London the Friday after the Summer Solstice. The night before, Luna had shaved off Harry’s hair until only an inch remained. Harry had practiced the salute the boys in the magazines did: a clenched fist thumped the chest and then raised perpendicular to the shoulder. They drove to Killin and Luna apparated them to a phone box behind Euston Station, papered with postcards of naked women offering a wide variety of services. In a public lavatory, Harry changed into his robes and smeared Muggle concealer over his scar. He cast the charms that Luna had shown him: he turned his skin the same pale pink as the concealer, he glamoured his eyes blue and gave them temporary twenty-twenty vision. He removed his glasses, and concentrated on his nose. He tapped it with his borrowed wand and it turned Roman. Harry snorted at his reflection, pocketing his glasses. 

Luna laughed when he exited the toilet. “You look odd,” she said. 

She left him on Tottenham Court Road and went in search of the exhibitions she had come to see. Harry strode as confidently as he could manage into the Leaky Cauldron. No one gave him a second glance. He walked into the alleyway and tapped the right brick. Diagon Alley opened up to him just as if the last twenty odd years had never happened. The crowds, Flourish & Blotts, and Madam Malkins all remained. He walked all the way down Diagon Ally, marvelling at the way it seemed to have stood still over the last quarter of a century. Then he had the thought that that meant they supported the new regime. He hurried past Ollivander’s worn shop front. Outside of Gringott’s, he noticed the first change. 

To the right of Gringott's, a new road lined with austere buildings extended all the way to the Ministry building. Even as he shuddered at the stage outside the Ministry that he recognised from the Prophet photographs of his friends being killed, Harry wondered at the magic that had joined these two geographically distinct magic areas. A crowd was gathered before the stage and, as Harry watched, three figures, two adult and one a child, walked onto the stage. The crowd fell silent.

* * *

Finch-Fletchley’s trial had been worse than Theodore had expected. His own testimony had been relatively straightforward. It had been a few years since he had had to give evidence before a jury. He had spoken to the jury as calmly he could manage, his knee jiggling with a combination of fury and nerves. Of the twelve witches and wizards sat before him, he recognised only Creevey from whom he bought camera equipment regularly. Theodore had watched the jury's faces twist when he described the effects of the wards, the listless child, and Finch-Fletchley's attempt at bribery. 

The testimony of the Healer at St Mungo’s who had examined the child was worse still. The child’s physical growth was stunted and it had rickets from being kept inside for long. But the mental impact was far worse. The child had not spoken for nearly a month. They had no idea that they were a wizard. While they had fond memories of their mother, their father was a distant figure who spent as little time as possible in the flat. This child, who possessed such strong magic, could be intellectually damaged for life the Healer declared. 

After that testimony, Theodore had no doubt Finch-Fletchley would be sent down for the longest possible sentence. The jury found Finch-Fletchley guilty on all counts in less than two hours. His sentencing was deferred until the next month. 

Theodore walked into court for sentencing and noted that the Dark Lord was sat in the front row. The child was sat next to him, looking pathetic. The Dark Lord looked up with a stern expression and pointed to the empty seat next to him. Theodore sat down next to him. Finch-Fletchley was given seventeen years in the Panoptican, no chance of parole for the first ten. The Dark Lord nodded in satisfaction, one arm around his ward’s shoulder and the other patting Theodore’s knee. “Come, I require one more sacrifice from you, Theodore,” he said, standing. 

He led Theodore and the child out to the platform where capital punishment used to be enacted when they were under martial law. There was a vast crowd below them, reaching almost to Diagon Alley. Theodore blinked and tried to still the trembling of his legs. 

“Today, we saw justice done,” the Dark Lord began, his voice echoing down the long street. “Our magical children will not, cannot be mistreated in such horrific ways. It matters not if they are Pureblood, half-blood or Muggleborn, they are all equally deserving of realising their full potential. They deserve a good childhood, one where they can receive a full education and practice magic openly. To think otherwise is an affront to all the magical world holds dear. The brutality of Finch-Fletchley’s actions will linger long in our collective memory and his mistreatments stand as a warning to our apathy. This cannot happen again. The educational reforms brought about by the steadfast work of Lady Abbott and that have recently passed our elected and unelected chambers will ensure that all young children, regardless of their lineage, will receive an education befitting of their status. Such progress should be applauded even while we remain disgusted by and wary of the backward ideology of Finch-Fletchley and his ilk. In a material expression of my support of these new reforms, I have taken Euan Jones, the child who Finch-Fletchley abused so appallingly, to be my ward. Today, I also offer a commendation to Captain Nott, the Auror responsible for freeing the boy from his imprisonment. Remember this case. And remember the good that came from it as well as the horror it induced.”

The crowd cheered, saluting the Dark Lord as one. Theodore rose a salute in response, about the most earnest salute he had ever raised in his life. The Dark Lord’s hand gripped his shoulder and squeezed.

* * *

Harry was stood at the back of the crowd, pulling a disbelieving face at the man with Voldemort's voice, rubbing his throbbing forehead. The people around him were raising their arms in salute. He did not raise his own.

Then there was a hand on his shoulder and he looked up at his potion professor’s face. “You thought you could hide from me, boy?” Snape snarled and dragged him into a nearby shop.

Harry was too shocked to think of anything to say before Snape had thrown a handful of floo powder into the grate and said “Spinner’s End,” before forcing them both through the grate. 

“Still turning up like a bad knut, eh Potter,” Snape snarled, releasing Harry’s arm and letting him drop to the Persian carpet. 

Harry swallowed back nausea and glared up at Snape. “Fuck you.”

Snape rapped Harry hard on the knee with a stick. Harry yelped and rolled away from him. “Pity, I thought you might crumble into dust.”

Harry looked up at him, his eyes widening. “You,” he managed, “you trapped me in that fucking ring.”

Snape smiled nastily. “Well done Mr Potter, five points to Gryffindor.”

“Why?”

“I want to know how you escaped from the ring,” Snape said, leaning over him, the stick raised. 

“Fuck you,” Harry said, closing his eyes before the inevitable blow fell. 

Instead, Harry was pulled up and dumped into an armchair. “Look at me.”

Harry begrudgingly opened his eyes. Snape’s were staring straight into his own and Harry felt a pressure in the back of his skull and then memories rose unbidden. He was lying in the snow in his dress robes shouting at Luna, he was startled by a pheasant in her rickety old car, he was listening to her describe how she had rescued him as they sipped beer on the ferry, Luna was sat next to him on St Kilda’s telling him how she had faked her own death. The pain was gone as quickly as it had arrived. “What the fuck was that?” Harry snapped. 

“Interesting,” Snape said, binding Harry to the chair with a flick of his wrist. “I always did think Ms Lovegood’s death was a bit too Daphne du Maurier.”

“You read Muggle novels?” Harry asked stupidly.

“I’ve seen the film,” Snape said with a faint smile.

Harry slumped back in his chair. “I knew you could read minds.”

“Legilimency, Potter. Which you would know if you had paid more attention in class.”

“It’s not my fault my schooling was so tragically cut short.”

“I did that for your own protection. I thought you’d prefer being in a fairy ring to being locked in a trunk, dosed up on dreamless sleep.”

“That is a shit answer, Snape.”

“How long did it feel like you were in that ring?”

Harry glared at him mulishly. “Hours, I suppose.”

Snape looked smug. “Like I said, a good solution for both of us.”

Harry humphed. “What? So that I could reemerge, still fourteen years old, all my friends dead, to challenge old snake face at the height of his powers?”

“Obviously, you weren’t supposed to have been released yet.”

“How long were you planning on keeping me in there?”

“Most of the books I read suggested you would be expelled from the circle a hundred years and a day after you entered.” Snape shrugged. “I had hoped the Dark Lord would be dead by then.”

“A hundred years,” Harry echoed dully.

“There was a real possibility that you might crumble to dust at your first human contact,” Snape continued, “but I thought it worth the risk.”

“Jesus, Snape. But why protect me in the first place? You hate me.”

Snape settled on the edge of his desk and crossed his arms. “I swore I would protect Lily’s son after she died.”

Harry gaped at him. 

* * *

Luna was sat in a Bloomsbury pub, contentedly sipping a pint of Taddy Bitter. The pub was one that was frequented by literary figures and there were portraits of Dylan Thomas and George Orwell adorning the walls. She checked her phone. Harry had another fifteen minutes before they were due to meet. She went to order another pint. She was not worried until it was quarter past six. Sighing, she placed a beer mat over her half finished pint and lay back on the seat, closing her eyes. She was asleep almost instantly, falling into a dream of a grimy post-industrial town. A tug in her belly led her down a cobbled street, past a Bargain Booze shop, to stand outside a terrace house. 

Luna woke with a start, ignoring the glances of the other patrons. She chugged her pint and walked down an ally way and crouched behind industrial sized wheelie bins and focused on the house she had seen in her dream. There the sound of a branch snapping and she was stood outside of the terraced house. She hesitated for only a second and then pushed open the garden gate, feeling the wards prickle against her skin. Before she could reach for the door bell, the door opened. “Professor Snape,” she said.

“Ms Lovegood,” Snape said, opening the door wider to let her in. “I was wondering when you would turn up.” 

He showed her into an office where Harry was bound to a dark green armchair, looking furious. “An Outstanding in your Potions OWLs, I believe,” Snape said, as Harry looked on open mouthed. 

“I never received my results, Professor.”

“A shame,” Snape said demurely.

“What the fuck,” Harry said.

“Just because you would have been pleased with a Troll, Potter.”

“We’ll never know now,” Harry growled, “thanks to you.”

Snape smirked. “I do not need to be a Seer to know what your potions results would have been.”

Harry narrowed his eyes. “Fuck you Snape.”

“You need to vary your insults.”

“You put Harry in the fairy ring,” Luna cut across their insults.

Snape inclined his head. “I should congratulate you on freeing him. Not even the late, great Ms Granger could find Potter.” 

“Don’t you fucking dare say her name,” Harry said, struggling against his bonds.

“I had help from the heavens,” Luna said.

Snape snorted. “Regardless, few could have done it.”

“Why is she not tied up?” Harry asked.

“Professor Snape has always liked to have power over you, Harry,” Luna said quietly.

Snape’s lips thinned and he vanished the ropes binding Harry to the chair. “I am no longer a Professor.”

“Then I am Luna, Severus.”

Harry shook blood into his hands and performed a complex dance move with his feet with a snort. “How touching. You’re not calling me Harry.”

“Certainly not, Potter. But then you have never had any respect for titles.”

“What happens now?” Harry asked, standing and holding his hands in front of the fire. “Are you going to present us to the Lord of the Snakes with a bow on top?”

“Don’t be stupid Potter, I just told you I am bound to protect you.”

Harry shrugged uselessly. “Then what do I do now?”

“I would suggest you run. No one knows you have returned. Take an extended holiday. Travel the world with Ms Lovegood.”

“I can’t. Not while he lives,” Harry said resignedly. 

* * *

When he walked into the MisWiz corridor there was a teenage boy, tightly bound and with dark skin, sat outside the accidental magic offices. The boy mouthed an obvious “Help,” at Theodore. 

“You’ll get no aid from that quarter, raghead,” Bole said from his office door.

“Bit old for your lot,” Theodore said, pleased to gloat over someone else’s failures. 

“He’s an Afghan,” Bletchley said behind him, “what the Muggles call an immigrant. His magic’s pretty strong. He took half the detention centre down when we went to fetch him. The Muggle morons were going to deport him.”

“It was great fun,” Bole said gleefully, kicking the boy in the shins. “Maybe we should invade your country for fresh magic, eh Musselman?”

The boy paled and started struggling.

“Invading Afghanistan rarely ends well,” Theodore said, fixing a sneer on his face and striding towards his office.

He marked another apparition spot on his map of the Highlands and tossed it aside. He picked up a report from his intray. There had been a sighting of Fletcher in a Peckham pub. Theodore put fresh supplies of potions into his bag and left for South London. 

* * *

“Ms Lovegood, Luna, I would speak to you alone.”

Luna followed Snape out of the office. “Careful Luna, that cunt killed Dumbledore,” Harry near yelled from by the fire. 

“Dumbledore was dying, Harry,” Luna said dreamily. 

Harry was left alone to consider this disquieting thought. He shook his head and went to search Snape’s desk. None of the drawers yielded to his viscous tugs. One of the lower ones stung him with an electric shock. Harry released it with a yelp. He gave up and picked up the _Prophet_ on the table instead. The difference in tone between news articles and gushing editorials was barely discernible. Harry paused at a photo illustrating an article on Voldemort giving a speech in France. The image was that of a man of perhaps forty, his expression stern. Harry searched in vain for any resemblance to the boy he had met in the mirror or the parasite sprouting from he back of Quirrell's head. He stretched forward and picked up a quill, drawing a handlebar moustache and devils horns on Voldemort’s visage.

Snape and Luna came back into the room. “You need to teach the boy to apparate. And his animagus form if possible. I remember his wretched father being proficient at a young age.”

“I am sat right here,” Harry ground out.

“I would suggest Occlumency but I fear it is a lost cause with Potter’s temperament. The outskirts of Edinburgh should allow you to practice relatively undetected.”

Luna nodded. “Tell Harry what the Dark Lord requires you to do, Severus.”

Annoyance flickered over Snape’s face before he turned to Harry. “The Dark Lord requires me to brew a potion that shows your location every year or so. It is akin to the one Luna brewed to track you down. So far, it has shown that you are alive but on another plane. The next one will show no such thing.”

“When?” Harry asked, dry mouthed. 

“Christmas Eve. You were lucky he was too distracted by the Finch-Fletchley case to request it last year.”

“And how accurate is the potion?”

“Without bodily matter, not very.”

Harry relaxed a little. “Good.”

“Your resurrection will not go unnoticed for very long. You have been lucky so far. Do seriously consider a tour of Europe. Otherwise you and Ms Lovegood, Luna will be in grave danger.”

“Thanks for your cowardly suggestion Snape. Any clues on how to defeat the noseless wonder?”

“Unfortunately, it is now obvious the Dark Lord is immortal. Even if you get close enough to him to cast a successful killing curse there is no guarantee he will stay dead.”

“Fuck,” Harry said, rubbing his short hair distractedly. 

“The good news is that he will likely still be unable to touch you. He intended to use your blood in his resurrection but had to settle for Diggory’s instead after my intervention.”

“Don’t look so fucking smug about imprisoning me for decade, Snape.”

“I saved your life Potter,” Snape snarled. “You would have died in Diggory’s place had I not intervened.”

“Fuck you,” Harry muttered.

Snape stiffened suddenly. “My wards have been breached. Luna, I presume you have a way out of here?”

“Yes,” Luna said, removing a locket from round her neck. 

Snape thrust Harry’s wand at him. “I’ll be in touch. Go.”

Luna grasped Harry’s wrist and said “Portus.” 

Harry felt a tug at his navel and then he was stood in the dark hallway of large house. “Where are we?”

“Grimmauld Place,” Luna said, releasing his wrist and pulling out her wand.


	7. Chapter 7

Luna cast a quiet Lumos and crept further down the hallway. Harry looked up at what appeared to be stuffed house elves heads mounted on the wall and then across the hall to where there was a huge blast mark, revealing the brickwork behind the plaster. There was a dense smell of mildew and a more subtle scent of damp fur. “This place is rank,” he muttered, kicking an umbrella stand that looked like it was made from a mouldy elephant's foot.

“It’s yours,” Luna said, freezing a cloud of doxies who rose from behind magenta curtains. 

“What?”

“Sirius made you the Black heir in his will. This is one of the Black properties.”

“What a legacy,” Harry said, eyeing the cobwebby ceilings with distaste and followed her into the kitchen. “How did we get here?”

“It was an Order safe house. During the war, we had port keys made for emergencies. I thought it might have been compromised, but the wards feel untouched.” She vanished the dust that lay on the kitchen surfaces and lit the stove. “We can stay for a few days. At least until you can apparate.”

Harry looked dubiously round the fusty room. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to sleep in this house.”

Luna ignored him and disappeared into the pantry in search of food.

* * *

Severus got rid of the fund raisers for the Muggleborn Orphans’ Education Fund with a Gringott’s order for 4 sickles and a snarl. He checked his office for any sign that The Boy Who Danced had been there and found only the graffiti on the photograph of the Dark Lord. He dumped the newspaper into the fire. 

He poured a healthy measure of Muggle whisky into a glass and sipped it staring into the fire, trying to work out the impossible puzzle of how to keep Harry Potter safe. In the end, he wrote a list, to be followed one after the other like potion instructions. The first read “Get drunk.”

He refilled his glass. Tomorrow, he would investigate that particularly nasty binding spell he had stumbled upon in the Lestrange Library. 

* * *

After a surprisingly okay pasta dinner Luna had made from food under stasis spells paired with a glass of watered down red wine from the cellar, Harry had passed out in a dusty bed in a dark green room. He woke to the smell of coffee and burnt toast. In the light of a summer morning, Grimmauld Place looked less vampire gothic and almost welcoming. Luna was sat at the kitchen table, leafing through a book with images of men turning into animals, expressions of pain on their faces. There was a small box by Harry’s place. He looked at it, a nostalgic tug in his chest. “That’s my trunk,” he said. 

Luna hummed. “Dumbledore had it stored here in case you returned.”

Harry waved his borrowed wand and the trunk grew to its regular size. Luna managed to grab her mug of coffee in time but the toast was scattered across the floor. 

“I’m going to the potions lab,” Luna said. “We’ll start apparating lessons after lunch. Try not to get in too much trouble.”

Harry was too busy pulling clothes and books out of his trunk to pay her any attention.

* * *

Severus threw the book on protective wards against the wall. He had spent the last five days investigating ways to keep Potter safe and under his control. The binding spells nearly always required the two participants to be in love or to have sex, conditions that were both impossible and distasteful. Love potions were out of the question for similar reasons. Wards were nearly always based on blood and trust magic that were too incriminating even if Potter cold ever be convinced to put his faith in Severus.

Severus was despairing of finding a solution that did not require him to befriend or fuck the fourteen-year old. If the boy could not be convinced to take an extended holiday to Nepal, perhaps keeping him under Lovegood’s care was the best solution. 

He would have to tell them about the Horcruxes.

* * *

Apparating was easy. After three days, Harry was apparating up and down the stairs at Gimmauld Place, exploring dusty room after dusty room while Luna brewed increasingly smellier potions in the lab downstairs. Now he was in control of it, he decided he quite liked the feeling of apparition. 

Some rooms had been used more recently than others. All the drawers of the sideboard in the dining room were open and empty. There were pale rectangles on the walls of the drawing room, marking where paintings had hung until recently. The bedrooms were layered with a good two inches of dust. In a spare bedroom towards the back of the house, under a four poster bed, he found a Weasley jumper with a G knitted on the front. He slumped against the wardrobe and sniffed the jumper, sobbing at the stale smell of fireworks and hair oil. In another bedroom, at the back of a desk drawer, he found notes on a Fifth Year Charms textbook written in Hermione’s neat hand. 

Harry spent a lot of time in Sirius’ teenage bedroom, mourning the godfather he had barely known. The sun-faded Muggle posters of motorbikes and naked women stuck to the walls made him smile as he sorted through the drawers and wardrobe. In a cardboard box at the bottom of a cupboard, he found a collection of Penguin paperbacks priced in Shillings. In the hot summer evenings when he struggled to fall asleep, he lay on Sirius' bed and read the slim novels by Camus, Solzhenitsyn and Böll. Inside the books, Underground tickets and chocolate frog cards marked important pages while marginalia in Sirius' haphazard scrawl kept up a running commentary. Harry had never felt as close to his godfather as he did while reading those books.

On the third day, Luna took him to the library and taught him spells to show if the books were cursed. As the current Black, he could access far more books than she could. At first, just to piss off Snape, he read about Occulmency and animagus transformation but both seemed like they would require months of study. He settled on a series of books on jinxes and hexes, most of them far darker than those that had been taught at Hogwarts. He practiced on a particularly vicious maroon arm chair that bit Harry every time he tried to sit on it. 

He felt, at last, that he was doing something, even as he craved information about the world outside Grimmauld Place that was not twenty years out of date. 

* * *

Severus Snape’s current position in the Dark Lord’s government was not well-defined. He was not head of the Death Eaters like Bellatrix or head of the Wizengamot like Narcissa. Few understood why Severus had given up the Headship of Hogwarts as soon as the War was over. But his reputation was impressive enough that no one questioned or impeded his movements in the Ministry. Severus swept through the atrium and took the lift to the basement where the records were kept. He nodded to the archivist and signed his name on the entry sheet. No one else had entered today. He went to the criminal files first. Luna Lovegood’s file was not especially thick and had not been updated in nearly two decades. Severus flipped through her short list of crimes. Luna had escaped Britain in the late nineties and then been sporadically hunted along the European Coast. Her death after her father’s boat had washed up on the west French coast was not doubted. No connection with the Auror who had gone missing in Spain was made. Severus sneered. It seemed everyone underestimated Luna.

He replaced the file and went to view the magic tracking maps. He was impressed with Luna’s reserve when it came to using magic. If he had not known what he was looking for, he doubted he would have spotted the pattern. He wrote down a number of grid references and walked to the archive entrance. A man in Muggle sportswear was signing himself in at the desk. “Captain Nott,” Severus said.

“Professor Snape,” Nott said, his face showing faint pleasure before falling back to blank. 

“Where are you posted now?”

Theodore’s face stayed blank. “MisWiz. Cold cases, Professor.”

“Ah, no doubt a difficult job, Captain Nott.”

Theodore acknowledge this with a faint nod. “What brings you to the archives, Professor?”

“Undertaking another impossible task for the Dark Lord,” Severus said, sweeping past the man. “Good evening Captain Nott.”

“You and me both,” Nott muttered as Severus stalked up the corridor.

* * *

Harry was sat swinging his legs on a bench in the potions lab, reading a book on animagus transformation. Luna was brewing something that smelt like rotten eggs and muttering a rap song about lies and truth. The combination of the book and the smell was making his head ache. He stiffened suddenly. “Luna, I felt something. Like an electrical charge.”

“The wards,” Luna said, drying her hands on her trousers and reaching for her wand. “Put on your cloak.”

Luna cast a disillusionment spell on herself and crept out of the laboratory, Harry following close behind. At the top of the stairs, they paused. Several floors above them, someone was whistling “A Cauldron of Hot Strong Love” tunelessly. They took the stairs carefully, stepping over the one just before the second floor landing that creaked horribly. The whistling led them to the attic. Luna led the way up the spiral staircase and they stood at the top, watching a hairy, smelly man shoving silver plates into a duffel bag. 

“Stupefy,” Luna enunciated. The man barely had time to turn before he slumped to the floorboards.

Harry pulled the hood from his head and rolled the man over. He had bloodshot eyes and smelt of a heady mixture of piss, tobacco and beer. “Do you know him?”

“Mundungus Fletcher,” Luna said. “He was a member of the Order.”

“Do you think he knew we were here?”

“No, he’s just here to steal your silver.”

Harry looked down at the man. “What now?”

“We should kill him,” Luna said with no inflection.

Harry looked up at her, shocked. “No!”

“It would be easier if we did,” Luna said, crouching down and searching the man’s greasy tweed jacket.

“We can’t, Luna.”

“Fine,” Luna said. “Search his bag and decide what you can bear to part with.”

“All of it,” Harry muttered but tipped the bag upside down anyway. Silver platters bearing the Black crest clattered onto the floor followed by 1970s Muggle pornography magazines and a clump of jewelry. Harry reached down and picked up a heavy locket bearing an S. He disentangled its chain from the mass of jewelry and without thinking made to put it round his neck. 

Luna caught his wrist. “Don’t,” she hissed, pulling the locket from his resisting hands. 

“Can’t you hear it?” Harry said, feeling strangely bereft. 

“Exactly,” Luna said, turning the locket over in her hands. 

“I don’t want Dungmungus to have it,” Harry said mulishly. "It's mine."

“No fear,” Luna said, putting the locket inside a Victorian trunk and slamming it shut. “Put the rest back in his bag.”

Harry kept back one of the more interesting pornography magazines (”Soho Queens: Your Pain, Their Pleasure”) and a signet ring bearing the Black crest, shoving the remainder of the objects back into the bag. He dropped the bag next to Luna and took a step back from the whispering locket. “Put your hood back up,” Luna said. “Evenerate. Obliviate.” The man sat up blinking stupidly and then his eyes glazed. Luna glared into his eyes with great concentration for five minutes and then cast a quiet, “Stupefy.” She sat back on her heels, closed her eyes and cast a spell with a series of complex runic movement over the Victorian trunk.

Harry felt his body relax as the locket’s whisperings were silenced. “What was that thing?”

“I don’t know. Powerful dark magic.” Luna stood shakily. “I’m going to have to dump Dung somewhere. Don’t try and open that case.”

“No fear,” Harry said with a forced grin, following Luna downstairs as she levitated Mundungus in front of her.

“I should be back in two hours,” Luna said. “If I’m not back by morning, apparate to Killin and make your way back to the cottage.”

“You’re not going to kill him?” Harry asked, gripping the magazine in his hand tightly. 

“No Harry, not if you don’t will it.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: racist slur.

Luna apparated to the rose garden at Finsbury Park, letting Mundungus fall to the grass. She positioned him on a park bench, his duffel bag by his side and a bottle of fire whisky in his hand. She backed away, cast an Evernerate and apparated back to Grimmauld Place. Harry was sat at the kitchen table reading a magazine, his fingers in his hair, his scar bright red on his forehead. She had offered him the spell to regrow his buzz cut but he had shook his head and offered no explanation. 

“We’re safe for a few months,” Luna said. 

“Oh thank God, let’s work out my animagus form.”

Luna nodded. “We’ll start tomorrow. It’s been a long day.”

Harry stood, rolling up the magazine. “Night Luna. Thank you.”

* * *

Theodore was stood in the staff room, just returned from his July meeting with Hornby. She had asked for a blow by blow account of the Finch-Fletchley trial. Then, Theodore had told her about Bashir and the dragon in the Cairngorms. Best of all, he had managed to corner Hornby’s assistant in the corridor and ask about the coffee. Apparently the trick was to brew it for twenty-four hours. He checked over his shoulder and pulled a packet of Nescafe out of his inside pocket, tipping a healthy measure into a saucepan and filling it with water. He set it on the stove to boil and cast a strong Notice-Me-Not spell.

It was at that moment that a black paper aeroplane flew into the staff room and landed in the saucepan. Theodore scooped it out of the brown liquid with a feeling of dread. The note paper bore an amalgamation of the Gaunt and Slytherin crest. In white ink, now stained brown, was written, “My office. Now.” 

“How did he know?” Theodore asked pitifully, emptying the contents of the saucepan down the sink. “Can he smell coffee through the mark?”

Bletchley past him in the corridor, holding a mug with ‘This may or may not be fire whisky’ printed on it. “Do I smell coffee?”

Theodore thrust the packet of Nescafe at her. “Careful, I think there’s a trace on it.”

Bletchley barked a laugh. “You’ve finally lost it Nott.”

The Dark Lord’s office spanned most of the ninth floor. Nott had not been up here since receiving a commendation for his capture of girl Weasley in the mid 2000s. In the intervening years, the carpet had got thicker, the portraits more distinguished, the silencing charms more dense. Theodore straightened his shoulders and wished he had remembered to pick up his robes before coming. He crossed the entrance room to where Percy Wesley was sat behind a desk, reading a report with pursed lips. 

“Weasley, I’m here to see the Dark Lord,” Nott said, thrusting the letter at him.

Weasley took the damp note gingerly between his finger and thumb and dropped it into the bin. “Captain Nott, this way.” 

Theodore followed Weasley through an office containing four Aurors, a room full of typewriters magically churning out copies of reports, an empty library, and a room with a map of Europe and Bellatrix Lestrange looming over it. Walking down a long picture gallery, he considered congratulating Weasley on the birth of yet another sprog but could not stomach it. When he saw Weasley in the canteen or the atrium, he always felt a kind of horror well in his stomach. The last of the Weasleys still free, serving the man who had had the rest of his family killed, imprisoned or exiled. It was a relief when Weasley ushered him into an office with the words, “Captain Nott, my Lord." 

The Dark Lord was stood by the window, a cup and saucer in his hand. Finch-Fletchley’s child was zooming round the room on a practice broom. Theodore crossed from the door, dodging the child, and bowed. “You wanted to see me, my Lord.”

The Dark Lord looked him up and down, an amused look on his face. “Do you ever dress like a wizard, Theodore?”

“Apologies, my Lord. I was at the Met this morning.”

“Come, I want to get to the Cairngorms before sunset.”

Theodore tried and failed to hide his surprise. “My Lord?”

“I did promise to take you both to see the dragon if you performed well at the trial,” the Dark said, setting his saucer on the desk. “What did you think my summons was for?”

“Nescafe,” Theodore muttered, looking down at his scuffed brown shoes. 

“Unless you are gun running, I do not particularly care what you bring back from the Muggle world for your own personal use, Theodore,” the Dark Lord said, gripping Theodore’s chin and tilting his head back. 

“I wouldn't put it past Bole,” Theodore said, unable to tear himself away from the Dark Lord’s eyes. The memory of buying Bole tickets to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for his birthday last year rose unbidden. Then the memory of Bole at the Christmas party, turning up with a case of Prosecco he had liberated from a Mudblood’s family. Then the memory of the morning after the party, Bole passed out in Theodore’s bed, wearing his Celtic shirt, bare arse visible. 

“A most interesting character,” the Dark Lord said, releasing Theodore’s jaw and turning away. “Euan, get off that infernal contraption and come here.”

The child lowered itself to the thick carpet, propped the broom against the desk and took the hand the Dark Lord was holding out to him. The Dark Lord held out his other hand to Theodore. He took it, those thin, cool fingers gripping his clammy hand firmly.

“Hold on tight boys” the Dark Lord said.

“Yes Daddy,” said the child.

Theodore barely had time to repress a shudder before he was pulled through the narrow tube. And then they were stood high up on one side of a long valley, the setting sun golden on the cliffs opposite them where a small dragon shot a thin line of fire into the air. Theodore thought it was one of the most sublime things he had ever seen. The child dropped the Dark Lord’s hand and started clapping joyfully. It took Theodore several seconds before he too let go of the man’s hand and reached for the camera in his bag. 

* * *

Turning into an animagus was a pain in the arse. Harry had held a dried Mandrake leaf in his mouth for entire month. Luna had spelled it to be unremovable and unswallowable but the leaf made everything he ate or drank taste horrible. Even the rather delicious looking Victoria Sponge that Luna had baked for his birthday had tasted of mouldering parsnip. 

In the three weeks they had to wait for the full moon, Luna had sought out the necessary ingredients. She had collected dew untouched by human foot or sunlight. She had caught a specific blood thirsty moth. All this was for naught when the night of the full moon was cloudy. 

“Another month?” Harry asked with a groan.

Luna nodded and handed Harry a fresh Mandrake leaf. 

* * *

A magic mark sparked red over the Scottish Highlands. Theodore peered at it and leapt up, grabbing his anorak and camera. It was close to a point already marked on his map. He had them this time. He chased down to the apparating point in the atrium, ignoring Bole leading a woeful looking child dressed in a pink and brown school uniform, still clutching a hockey stick.

In the atrium, he concentrated on the beauty spot. He found himself stood in a car park by the side of Loch Ness. On the other side of the water, through the drizzle, stood a partially ruined castle. Theodore stared at it carefully and apparated across the Loch. Across the castle grounds, groups of tourists in waterproof ponchos were reading information boards and peering at the castle ruins. Theodore circled the site, coming to a stop when he saw a figure he recognised stooped over an information board near the entrance. 

“Professor Snape?”

The man looked up. “Theodore. What are you doing here?”

Theodore swallowed and walked towards him. “There have been unexplained bursts of magic in this area of the Highlands. I thought it might be Mundungus Fletcher apparating to a hiding place.”

Snape smiled thinly. “I’m sorry to disappoint, Theodore. Now I am retired, I find have more time to indulge my interest in Muggle history. I regularly visit historical sites throughout Britain. My apologies for wasting your time.”

Theodore nodded. “It was a long shot anyway. I apologise for interfering with your excursion.”

Snape inclined his head. “If I my ask, Theodore, why are you seeking Fletcher so diligently?”

“The Dark Lord wants him captured. As to why, your guess is as good as mine.”

Snape turned back to the information board. “I imagine our Lord is bored. There has been precious little to occupy him since the resistance was quashed and the beasts surrendered.”

Theodore tilted his head. “I am sorry again for interrupting your trip. Goodbye, sir.”

“Goodbye, Theodore.”

Theodore apparated back to the entrance hall of the Ministry and walked slowly back to his office. He stood in front of the board where the map and the various apparition points were marked and resisted the urge to tear all of it from the wall.

* * *

After Draco had happened upon Theodore having an after-work drink with the Dark Lord, Theodore found himself inundated with invitations to Pureblood events. It was like the year after the war all over again. He threw all the invitations onto the fire unanswered until a Sunday afternoon in mid-October when Pansy turned up at his door. Theodore let her in, dressed in his Celtic shirt and untorn jeans. “Theodore,” Pansy said with a sniff.

“Pansy, lovely to see you,” Theodore said smoothly. “A drink?”

“Gin and Tonic,” she said, leading the way into the the drawing room.

When they were both sat in front of the fire sipping cocktails, Pansy fastened her eyes on his. “You should come to Daphne’s All Souls Party.”

“Maybe,” Theodore said, knocking a cigarette out of the packet. 

“Come on Theodore, you’ve moped long enough over Blaise. I’m calling in that favour you owe me from Sixth Year.”

Theodore inhaled and held the smoke in his lungs, trying to remember what exactly she had done for him in Sixth Year. “Fine Pansy, but don’t expect to dictate who I take as my plus one.”

“As if I would Theodore.” Pansy smiled broadly. “You have always had excellent taste.

* * *

“How’s Snape going to get in contact with us?” Harry asked as Luna brewed the animagus potion with their moon infused Mandrake leaf. 

“I have his mobile number. He texted me the address of his flat in Edinburgh last week.”

Harry goggled at her. “Snape has a mobile?”

“Apparently so. The Nokia 3310 is not affected by magical interference.”

“Right. Whatever that is,” Harry said, wrinkling his nose at the smell coming off the potion. “Don’t you worry he’ll betray us?”

“Severus has sworn to protect you, Harry,” Luna said, throwing the moth into the cauldron. “Those bonds are hard to break.” 

“Gross.”

Luna looked up at him. “Have you finished packing?”

“Not quite,” Harry said, turning to walk up the stairs.

* * *

Theodore invited Bletchley to Daphne’s party while she was wrestling with a cafetiere in the staff room. One of the nifflers from Drug Enforcement had sniffed out their last batch of Nescafe the previous week. “Can’t,” she said shortly as coffee squirted out of the spout and nearly spattered Theodore’s shirt. “I’m on call with one of the trainees. Halloween’s almost as explosive as Christmas.”

“I’ll come with you Nott,” Bole said, swinging a beefy arm round Theodore’s shoulders. 

“Why don’t you just swop shifts with Bletchley?”

“You know he’s not allowed to look after new recruits since the Parsons incident,” Bletchley said, pouring the coffee with a scowl. 

Parsons had been one of the many uninspiring trainee Aurors assigned to their department whose only notable characteristic was being a nosey punctilio. Annoyed at having received a third warning from Wizarding Resources for treating Muggleborns with excessive force, Bole had cursed Parsons’ nose to grow longer every time she recited a rule from the Aurors’ Handbook.

She could not reach the tip by the time Bole cancelled the spell. He had been suspended for two months without pay by a furious Runcorn. 

“Fine, Bole. We’ll leave after work on Wednesday,” Theodore said, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the cafetiere. “Wear something smart.”

* * *

Harry and Luna met Snape in Edinburgh the weekend before Halloween. Snape led them up three flights of stairs to a top floor flat in the New Town. “I have it warded so magic use will not be picked up by outsiders,” Snape said, opening the door. 

“Excellent,” Luna said.

“I take it he can apparate now?” Snape asked Luna.

She nodded. “We also have our completed animagus potion. We have been held off using them until now so as to have a wizard to monitor our transformation.”

“Very good,” Snape drawled, turning on the kettle. “I will do my utmost to insure you are not trapped in your animal forms.”

Harry left the two of them in the kitchen and explored the rest of the flat. There was one bedroom and a box room. Harry left his trunk in the latter and pushed open the door to what was evidently the living room. He slumped on the sofa and stared at the ceiling. 

Luna came in with a mug of coffee. “Are you ready to try for your form?”

“Always.”

Snape entered the room, holding the two potions. He held them up to the light and made a disgruntled noise but handed Luna and Harry their respective vials. “Ms Lovegood, why don’t you go first.”

Luna uncorked the potion and swallowed it. For nearly a minute she remained unchanged and then, just as Harry thought they had failed again, she began to shrink. A tiny bird, no bigger than Harry’s hand, blinked up at them.

“A goldfinch,” Snape said approvingly as the bird took flight and circled the room. “Can you transform back, Luna?”

The bird landed on the hearth rug and changed into Luna. She grimaced. “What a feeling.”

“Quite,” Snape said. “At least you have a useful form. My own animagus form is that of a sardine.”

Harry bit back a nervous laugh. “Not a bat?"

"Like I haven't heard that joke before, Potter."

Harry looked down at the potion in his hand. "What happens if I turn into a giraffe or something?”

“Then you will have to rebuild the roof,” Snape said, gesturing at Harry to drink the potion. “Judging by your current small stature, however, I consider it unlikely.”

Harry pulled a face at Snape and downed his potion. Almost immediately, he felt his limbs lengthen. He shut his eyes against the pain. He heard Luna exhale in shock and opened his eyes. He could no longer see any part of his body and reared back in horror. He tried to speak but only let out a long neigh. 

“A Thestral,” Luna said quietly.

Snape’s face had somehow turned paler than usual. “At least he can fly, I suppose.”

“Concentrate on your human form, Harry,” Luna said, stepping forward and touching his nose gently.

Harry closed his eyes and pulled himself back into his human body. “What’s a Thestral?”

“A winged horse,” Luna said, placing a hand on his elbow.

“Why couldn’t I see myself? Is that normal for animagus?”

Luna shook her head. “You need to have seen someone die before you can see Thestrals.”

Harry closed his eyes and ran his fingers roughly though his hair. “My form is some harbinger of death? Like a grim?”

“Exactly,” Snape said, still not looking at Harry. “Although it is rare for an animagus form to take that of a magical creature.”

“I’d rather be a giraffe.”

Snape snorted. “Too late for that, Potter. You always did like to stand out from the crowd.”

“Fuck you,” Harry snarled.

Luna stood up. “I’m going to order pizza. Any strong feelings on toppings?”

“Ham and pineapple,” Snape said smartly. 

“Of course you have an awful taste in pizza toppings,” Harry said. “I’m happy with pepperoni.”

“Great,” Luna said, pulling out her phone. “Why don’t you go and buy a few beers Severus?”

Snape left the flat grumbling about strong willed Ravenclaws. Luna ordered the pizzas and sat down next to Harry. “Your form's not evil, you know that right?”

“Sounds pretty awful,” Harry muttered.

“They're quite gentle, really. But people avoid them because they're a bit...”

“Different.” Harry gave a hollow laugh. “I can work with different.”

“Nothing good can come from rejecting your form.”

“Alright, Ms Goldfinch.”

Luna gave a faint smile and left the room, coming back with plates and glasses. Snape returned with a pack of Tennent’s. “I have no idea if this beer is any good.”

“You mean you just bought the cheapest,” Harry said, cracking open a can.

“Shut up, Potter.”

The doorbell interrupted their slanging match. Luna came into the room with three pizza boxes. Snape accepted his pineapple pizza and cleared his throat. “I have to tell you why the Dark Lord is invincible. Have you heard of Horcruxes?”

Harry paused with a slice of pepperoni pizza halfway to his mouth and shook his head. Luna looked equally clueless.

“It is a means of splitting one's soul by killing someone. The Dark Lord stored several of his soul fragments in inanimate objects. That is how he returned after Potter killed him in 1981.”

“All of them need to be destroyed before he can die then?” Luna asked.

“Quite.”

“How many are there?” Harry asked.

“There were six. You unwittingly destroyed one in Slytherin’s Chamber. Dumbledore got another. The Dark Lord’s snake is almost certainly one. Dumbledore spoke of a locket. From hints that my Lord has dropped, I believe one remains at Hogwarts. Otherwise I have no other information.”

“I believe we might have found one,” Luna said, reaching for a slice of anchovy pizza. 

* * *

On Wednesday night, Theodore changed into Midnight blue robes that he had last worn to a funeral and walked along the corridor. Bole was stood in front of the magic map of Britain, twirling his wand. “Exciting day?” Theodore asked.

“Nope.” Bole said. “Not even a fart of accidental magic. The kids must be holding it all in for this evening. Bletchley and that Paki are going to have all the fun.”

“Singh,” Theodore said tiredly. “His name’s Singh.”

Bole turned round. “Well? Are we going to get slaughtered on the Greengrass Galleon or not?”

“Merlin, why did I invite you?” Theodore asked, following him into the lift. 

“Because my arse looks good in dress robes.”

Theodore turned to look Bole up and down. “Actually, you do look quite smart.”

“Yeah, and wait until you see what I’m wearing underneath my robes.”

“What are you wearing underneath?” Theodore asked cautiously, suspecting a trap.

“Nothing,” Bole crowed as the lift doors opened onto the atrium. “Absolutely starkers, just sporting a semi.”

Theodore grabbed Bole’s arm and dragged him towards the apparition point. “Unless someone had memorised Burke’s Peerage, they’d never guess you were a four-generation Pureblood.”

“We can’t all be Section 28ers Nott.”

“Sacred 28,” Nott corrected.

“Same broom-up-your-arse difference.”

Theodore ignored him and apparated. The windows of Greengrass Grove undamaged by fire were glowing invitingly. Theodore released Bole’s arm. “Can you at least try and behave?” he asked with faint hope.

“For you Nott, anything.”

A house elf showed them into the ball room. Bole made a beeline for the drinks table while Theodore hung back, surveying the crowd. Mostly, it was people from school and their respective partners. Flint was stood by the buffet, dressed in a Death Eaters uniform with medals pinned to his chest, eating cheese and medlar from a cocktail stick. Pansy was dancing with her Spanish husband, moving fluidly between the other partners. Draco was talking to Montague who, in turn, was staring fixedly at the ceiling. 

“Theodore,” said a voice behind him, “so pleased you could make it.”

Theodore turned and kissed Daphne on each cheek. “Thank you for the invitation.”

“No, it is I who should be thanking you for tracking down that awful man responsible for burning the east wing to the ground.”

Theodore inclined his head. “I hope his conviction means the insurers will finally pay out.”

“Unfortunately, they are still dragging their feet,” Daphne said. “The worst of it is, most of the family silver was kept in that wing and the foundations are too unstable to get them out without professional help.”

“A real pity.” Theodore stopped a passing house elf and took two glasses of champagne from the tray, handing one to Daphne. “I thought you might be annoyed at my part in the Finch-Fletchley scandal.”

Daphne snorted. “It serves Astoria right. My little sister always did have an awful taste in men. Justin struck me as having more than a little of Gilderoy Lockhart about him.”

Theodore smiled. They were distracted by a disturbance by the drinks table. Bole had upended a bowl of punch over Flint and both of them had drawn their wands. “Oh dear,” Theodore said.

“Who on earth invited that boor?” Daphne asked. “I shall have to go and quell tempers.”

Theodore left Daphne to try and control Bole and went to the Billiard Room.

He was watching Pansy thrash Draco at billiards for the third time in a row when the idea came to him. He refilled his glass of fire whisky and soda and walked out into the cold evening. The fire scorched beams of the west wing stood out starkly in the moonlight. He walked round the ruins with a smile. This would be the perfect lure. 

He went back inside and found a mutinous Bole slumped in a George IV dining room chair, watching the dancers. “Ready to go?” 

“Fine, I’d forgotten these Pureblood shindigs are never any fun.”

When Bole invited Theodore back to his for a coffee, Theodore was in such a good mood that he agreed. Even though Bole’s coffee was some Fairtrade muck from Colombia, he let Bole suck him off in the kitchen. He so convinced his newly formed plan would work that he let Bole fuck him with barely a demure. 

He crept out of Bole’s messy bedroom in the early hours of the morning and apparated to the office, setting about putting his plan into action.


	9. Chapter 9

Runcorn read Theodore’s application for two additional men for a special project with a faint frown. “I doubt this will be approved, Nott. MisWiz is hardly a Ministry priority.”

“But you will submit it, Major-General?”

“I am obliged to, Nott. However, considering your department’s previous treatment of new personnel, I can only hope that it is refused. Dismissed.”

The very next day, a memo ordering the transfer of two Aurors from the top ten of the latest graduating class to MisWiz landed in Theodore’s in-tray. 

“How on earth did you manage this coup?” Bletchley demanded, dumping a mug of coffee on Theodore’s desk and tapping the memo. 

“Friends in high places,” Theodore said, stretching his arms above his head. 

“You should’ve used your influence to stop this ridiculous crusade against instant coffee,” Bletchley said, slumping in a chair and lighting a cigarette with the end of her wand. “These two jobsworths will just be Bole’s new chew toys.”

* * *

Theodore read Daphne’s interview with Skeeter in the _Prophet_ with a broad smile. The Greengrass family silver was mentioned in the second paragraph. The probability that the fire had melted all identifying marks from said silver was just below the fold. Daphne’s overall tone was ditzy Pureblood heiress, clueless about insurance protocol. She had played her role perfectly. Theodore made a mental note to send her a box of wine from the Nott vineyards in France. 

Theodore looked up at the two recruits stood to attention in front of him. He tossed copies of Mundungus Fletcher’s file across the desk. “We are going to take shifts watching Greengrass Grove. We are waiting for the emergence of this missing thief.” The man and the woman in front of him picked up the file and looked nonplussed. “Remember, you could be responsible for catching the last Order member still at large. A man still on the run after more than two decades.”

The two Aurors brightened at that. “Yes, sir,” they snapped in unison.

Theodore passed them both timetables of the stake out schedule. “You’ll have to pull some overtime. I’m amenable to swapping shifts if you have a good reason. Do either of you have families?”

“No, sir,” they snapped in unison. 

“Right. Good I suppose. Boland you’re on first shift. Banks, get some sleep.”

* * *

Theodore liked night stake outs. He was sat with his back to a Giant Red Wood and a flask of tepid instant coffee by his feet, studying the night sky. The years of forced Astronomy lessons at Hogwarts had left the names of constellations and planets imprinted on his brain and, even with the light pollution from Birmingham, he could pick out the twin heads of Gemini right above him. The quiet was complete. He lit a cigarette.

Boland and Banks did not share his patience. After a month of no sightings of Mundungus, they were getting fractious. Only last week Boland had tried to report Bole for harbouring Muggle contraband when the man had made coffee in his Millwall F.C. mug. Bole had hit him with an obscure but nasty curse that gave Boland the runs for the next two days. No more had been said on the matter. 

Banks had channelled her frustration into rather more constructive ventures, dropping a very comprehensive Jungian analysis of Mundungus’ compulsions and motivations into his in-tray. He thought the section on Mundungus having telepathic dreams was a bit speculative but it would explain the man’s ability to evade capture for so long. He fully intended to write her a glowing report when the operation ended, success or failure. 

As dawn broke, the disillusioned form of Boland tapped him on the shoulder. “Relieve you, sir.”

“Thank you, Boland. I still have some coffee left if you would like it.”

“No thank you, sir,” the man said stiffly. 

Theodore shrugged and apparated back to the Ministry. There was a vast Christmas tree in the deserted atrium, decorated in Slytherin colours. Theodore took the stairs down to his office, wondering if he could risk reprimanding Boland in his next report. His office door was unlocked when he reached the quiet MisWiz offices. He drew his wand and pushed the door open. The Dark Lord was stood with his back to the door, inspecting the map of the Scottish Highlands, the photographs of the tourist sites Theodore had visited tacked with string. Theodore had not seen the man since their expedition to the Cairngorms. After they had visited the dragon, Theodore had been apparated under protest to Euan Jones’ eighth birthday party. He had spent the next three hours fending off the drooling scion of Pureblood families under the amused gaze of the Dark Lord. 

“An interesting project,” the Dark Lord said, peering at a photograph of the Jacobite monument at Glencoe.

“A dead end, my Lord.”

“Indeed.” The Dark Lord turned round. “And has your ruse to entice Fletcher into the open been any more successful?”

“Not yet, my Lord.”

The Dark Lord sat down in Theodore’s chair and crossed his legs. “You only have a fortnight left, Theodore.”

“I remain hopeful, my Lord.”

The Dark Lord made a doubtful noise, pulling Banks’ report towards him. “Do you have any coffee squirrelled away down here? Or have Runcorn’s nifflers sniffed it all out?”

“I’ll go and check my Lord,” Theodore said and edged out of the room. 

He found ground coffee from Java in a staff room cupboard and boiled water. He carried the cafetiere and two mugs back into his office. The Dark Lord accepted a mug bearing the Hogwarts' crest and tapped Banks' report. "Do you agree with this analysis?"

Theodore slumped in a chair. "I remain doubtful about the veracity of telepathic dreams."

"You live in a world where an owl can be turned into opera glasses and yet you doubt telepathic dreams?"

Theodore reached for his coffee. "A fair point, my Lord."

"For a Muggle, Jung was remarkably perceptive." The Dark Lord dropped the report back on Theodore's desk and scratched an eye brow. “What will you do if Fletcher does not fall for your bait?”

“Become Deputy Auror, I suppose, my Lord.”

The Dark Lord looked faintly amused. “You could have just asked me for the promotion, Theodore, instead of leading us all on this wild goose chase.”

Theodore blushed with embarrassment. “I’ll catch him for you, my Lord.”

* * *

Theodore made sure he was on shift during the Auror Christmas party in mid-December. It meant that, while he missed Bole cursing Boland with donkey ears, he avoided having to answer Runcorn’s embarrassing questions about the operation’s lack of progress. Fletcher still had not surfaced and the certainty Theodore felt when he had first enacted his plan had begun to wane. That night, after he was relieved by a thin-lipped Banks, he let himself into the Grove. 

Daphne was sat in her office, looking over estate papers. “Still nothing?” she asked as Theodore sat down opposite her and removed the disillusionment charm. 

“No. Maybe he came to scope it out and spotted us.”

Daphne made a sceptical noise. “Perhaps.” She put down her quill. “Are you going to the Malfoy’s Yule party?”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“Do. The attendee list goes in the _Prophet_ on Friday.”

Theodore unscrewed his flask of coffee and poured out a cup, squinting at her. “Cunning, Daphne. You’re too Slytherin for your own good.”

“I just want to take you as my date,” she said innocently. “My dress robes are to be sapphire.”

* * *

Theodore fidgeted with the sleeve of his sapphire robe, waiting in the atrium of the Ministry for Daphne. He had sent both Boland and Banks to the Grove. Bole had insisted on being made official back up. Bletchley had shrugged and said she doubted Fletcher could read, squeezing Theodore’s shoulder as she went to floo home. 

Daphne apparated into the entrance hall and Theodore swallowed. She was no longer quite the beauty she had been in her twenties but now she had a dignity that seemed better suited to her intelligence that so many overlooked. He held out a small box. 

“Heather,” she said, pinning the flower to her robe. “An unusual choice, Theodore.”

“For luck,” he said and offered his arm. 

“Did you see the Dark Lord himself is attending?” Daphne asked right before she side apparated him away.

“Yes,” Theodore said, looking up at Malfoy Manor, covered with conjured snow. “A great honour.”

Daphne led him up the drive and the door swung open. Narcissa greeted them and said something about uniting great houses. Ismelda surveyed Nott with cool eyes and made a comment about spring weddings. Behind them, Draco looked like he was trying not to snigger. Daphne gave a tinkling laugh and said she did not believe in London weddings. Theodore fixed what he hoped was an expression of faint amusement on his face and let Daphne steer him towards the ballroom. He made a mental promise to never again attend a Pureblood event. 

They danced. And though Theodore had not danced in more than two decades, the muscle memory drilled into him in the nursery and Daphne’s lead meant that he more than held his own. In the focus of remembering what limb went where, Theodore forgot for a moment about Mundungus and the Dark Lord and the Deputy Head Auror post. At the beginning of a slow dance, Daphne released his waist and asked, “Drink?”

Theodore nodded, not quite ready to speak. They crossed to the drinks table, flanked by a pair of peacocks carved in ice. Daphne ordered two fire whiskies and tonic and handed one to Theodore. He sipped it and looked up the bar. Astoria was smiling brilliantly up at the Carrow heir. Alexander Yaxley was glowering at Rasbastan Lestrange. The Dark Lord, mid-conversation with Marcus Flint, looked up and signalled to Theodore. 

“Oh fuck,” Theodore said, turning his head. 

Daphne took his arm and steered him up the bar. “Ah, Theodore. I was pleased to see you on the attendee list,” the Dark Lord said, his eyes glinting. “You do work so hard.”

“My Lord,” Theodore said with a bow. “Lady Greengrass was most insistent I attend.”

Daphne curtsied to the Dark Lord and he took her hand in his, kissing it softly. “Always a pleasure, Lady Greengrass. You should use your considerable influence on Theodore more often.”

She simpered. “I was just so grateful that he captured that awful Bashir. Accompanying him tonight was the very least I could do to repay him, my Lord.”

Flint’s eyes were flitting between Theodore and Daphne, a faintly confused expression on his face. 

“Loathe as I am to separate two young lovers,” the Dark Lord said, “I would speak to Theodore alone. Colonel Flint, perhaps you could be induced to offer Lady Greengrass a dance?”

“Of course, my Lord. A pleasure,” Flint said, offering an arm to Daphne. “If the Lady is amenable of course?”

Daphne took his arm and the pair walked to the dance floor and waited for the next waltz to begin. 

The Dark Lord watched them. “I did not think she was your type.”

“I’m not sure I’m her type either,” Theodore said before he could stop himself.

The Dark Lord turned his considering eyes on Theodore. “Ah, what the Muggles call a beard, I believe.”

“I, well, I do sometimes-” Theodore stuttered.

The Dark Lord held up his hand. “I did not summon you to discuss your sexual identity, Theodore. Tell me about your advances with Fletcher.”

“No sightings.”

“You only have a week left,” the Dark Lord said dangerously, “and yet you spend your time at a ball.”

“I-,” Theodore began.

A terrified looking waiter sidled up to them. “What?” the Dark Lord snapped at him.

“My Lord,” the man stuttered, looking at the floor, “there is an urgent floo call for Captain Nott.”

Theodore felt relief flood him, too fast for him to school his face. “What is it?” the Dark Lord hissed at him.

“I suspect we have Fletcher, my Lord.”

The Dark Lord’s hand gripped Theodore’s arm and near dragged him out of the ballroom. The crowd parted, throwing pitying looks at Theodore. The waiter showed them into Narcissa’s office. Banks’ exhausted face was blinking in the fireplace. “Banks?” Theodore said, dropping to his knees in front of her. 

“We have him in the cells, sir,” she said. “Put up a bit of a fight but Bole got him in the end.”

“I’ll be right there Banks, good work.”

The face withdrew. Theodore stood up, biting back a smile. The Dark Lord looked gleeful, an expression that Theodore had not seen since the War. He held out a hand to Theodore. As he took it, Theodore wondered again quite why the Dark Lord cared so much about Mundungus. 

The Dark Lord apparated them straight to Theodore’s office. Theodore clutched at his desk to stay upright. The Dark Lord strode out into the corridor without a backward glance. Theodore chased after him, not catching him until they reached the cells. The Dark Lord was stood next to an awed Boland who looked like all his Yules had come at once and was asking if the Dark Lord wanted a seat conjured. The Dark Lord ignored Boland’s chatter, covetously watching a bedraggled and bloodied Fletcher through the one way mirror as he was interrogated by Bole and Banks. 

“Boland, tell us what happened,” Theodore said.

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. It was just after ten. Fletcher was wearing an invisibility cloak but it was wearing thin. Banks’ spotted him entering the west wing. I called Bole for back up. Fletcher fought viciously. He had a knife. He punched Banks in the nose. He.” Boland paused, looking slightly ashamed. “He stunned me and was making his escape when Bole arrived and hit Fletcher with a cutting curse and a body bind. Fletcher’s only just stopped bleeding.”

“Has the thief said anything yet?” the Dark Lord asked.

“Not about himself. He’s offering information on another Order member for a reduced sentence. But that’s absurd of course. He’s the last one.”

“Dismissed,” the Dark Lord said, not shifting his gaze from the interrogation room where Bole was threatening Fletcher with a tickling charm. 

Boland bowed and left the room, a tragic look on his face. 

“Who was that idiot?” the Dark Lord asked. 

“One of the new Aurors you sent us, My Lord.”

The Dark Lord looked at Theodore with the ghost of a smile on his lips. “I picked them because their surnames began with B. Maybe I should have looked more closely at their records.”

Theodore shrugged. “Banks is an exemplary Auror. A fifty-fifty success rate is not to be sniffed at.”

The Dark Lord did laugh then. Although it might have been at the sight of Fletcher writhing on the floor, giggling uncontrollably under Bole’s wand. 

“Come, Theodore,” the Dark Lord said, placing a hand on Theodore’s shoulder, “I would like to see first hand how you conduct an interrogation.”

Fletcher’s face when the Dark Lord had entered the interrogation room was something else. Theodore promised himself he would dig out the family pensieve once this was all over and watch the memory through several times. The Dark Lord did not say anything immediately and let Theodore ask his questions. Fletcher answered them all with what did not seem to be outright lies. 

“Who is the other Order member you believe to be alive?” Theodore asked.

“Lovegood,” Fletcher said, his eyes not moving from the Dark Lord.

“The editor of the _Quibbler_?” the Dark Lord asked Fletcher, speaking for the first time.

“Nah, the daughter.”

The Dark Lord turned to Theodore with a raised eyebrow. “Year below me at school. By all accounts a bit dotty. Ran away before you took Hogwarts. Fled to Europe and died there.”

“She’s alive. I saw her. In a safehouse in Wales. Long after you lot said she was dead,” Fletcher near howled. 

“Enough, the Lovegood girl is not important,” the Dark Lord said. “Theodore, I would speak to Mr Fletcher alone.”

“Of course, my Lord.”

Daphne was sat waiting for Theodore when he returned to the room with the two way mirror. “I couldn’t miss this,” she said, conjuring a chair for Theodore and offering him a hipflask.

The mirror had been muted but the image of the cell remained. They watched the Dark Lord push into Fletcher’s mind, gently at first and then Fletcher’s mouth opened in a scream and he started pulling at his matted hair. “Sometimes I forget how powerful he is when he looks like some kindly relation,” Daphne said.

“You make him sound like Dumbledore.”

Daphne gave him an unamused look. “I didn’t realise he was interested in Fletcher.”

Theodore laughed sharply. “I more or less did it under his direct order. He’s been dropping into my office since the Finch-Fletchley case. I have no idea how that’s related to Fletcher.”

She stood up abruptly. “I shouldn’t be found here. Tell him attending the ball was your idea.”

“Uh, okay?” Theodore said, handing back her hipflask. 

“I’ll be in touch,” she said and left. 

Theodore bit his nails and watched Fletcher chew his tongue into a bloody mess. 

Finally, the Dark Lord pulled out of Fletcher’s mind and the man sunk unconscious to the cell floor. “Theodore,” the Dark Lord said from the cell, “come here.”

Theodore stood up and went back into the cell. “My Lord?”

“I need to borrow Fletcher. Make sure no one else knows he has left. He will be back by morning.”

“My Lord.”

Theodore sat in the locked interrogation cell, the mirror spelled opaque, for hours. It was gone four in the morning by the time the Dark Lord apparated into the cell with Fletcher holding his hand. Fletcher looked utterly broken. The Dark Lord looked furious. 

“Was his disappearance noticed?” 

“No, my Lord.”

“Good.” The Dark Lord hit Fletcher with a stunning charm unceremoniously. “Theodore, you have done well. I am having a little get together this evening. You will come.”

“My Lord,” Theodore managed.

“I’ll have Percy send the invitation,” The Dark Lord said, wiping his hand on a handkerchief.


	10. Chapter 10

The MisWiz office was in a state of barely contained excitement when Theodore staggered up from the cells. Boland was recounting the events of the night to Bletchley, conveniently leaving out that he had been stunned by Fletcher. Bole mentioned with affected casualness that the Dark Lord had praised the strength of his tickling charms. Bletchley brewed Nescafe from her secret stash to celebrate and even Banks was persuaded to have a sip. At ten, Runcorn strode into Theodore's office and shook his hand before trying to sign him up for management training. He asked for a week off instead and she begrudgingly granted it. At eleven, a note from Rita Skeeter arrived asking for an interview. Theodore wrote “In exchange for lunch” and sent it back. She wrote back “Member’s bar, 1 o’clock.” Theodore stood and vanished the grime from his dress robes. 

He came back from lunch, slightly tipsy from the bottle of pink Cava that Rita had insisted they drink, and found a black letter waiting for him. It was an invitation to spend Christmas Eve at a castle in Nairnshire, Scotland. Dress code: Muggle.

Theodore wondered briefly what would happen if he did not go. He supposed the Dark Lord would apparate to wherever he was hiding and Crucio him. Deciding he was too drunk to work, Theodore left the office, saying goodbye to Bole and Bletchley who were stood in front of the map of Britain, waiting for the Christmas rush to begin. He apparated back to the manor. It was a relief to strip off his dress robes and pour himself a whisky and sink into a bath. 

He dressed in his smartest Muggle suit, tying a Marylebone Cricket Club tie round his neck. He combed his hair in front of the mirror. “You look knackered,” the mirror said snidely. 

“Shut up,” Theodore said, turning away and throwing floo powder into the grate. "Cawdor Castle." 

* * *

Severus hated Christmas. He especially hated Christmas Eve. Evey year, the Dark Lord invited his old faithful to reminisce about the War and raise a glass to the fallen. According to the history books, the end date of the War was New Year’s Eve 1997. But every veteran knew the killer blow had been struck on Christmas Eve. The Dark Lord had taken down the Order that night. Oh he was deranged back then, but glorious to watch in a duel. That night, no wizard could hold a candle to him. He had slaughtered Mad Eye Moody and Kingsly Shacklebolt in the Burrow's vegetable patch, neither Auror able to so much as land a curse. Innumerable Weasleys had fallen before him, defending their family home. Tonks had died with her child in her arms. The Dark Lord had disembowelled Lupin, leaving him bleeding out in the Weasley kitchen, when the wolf had come looking for revenge. 

After the fall of the Order, the Battle of Hogwarts had been somewhat of an anti-climax. A week later, Scrimgeour had signed the armistice treaty in the grounds of Hogwarts. Some of the surviving rebels had tried to fight on, of course. They had bombed civilian targets and run underground radio shows. But they lacked a figurehead. Their only chance to win had been a short, sharp and decisive victory. And in that they had failed. Now, if the _Prophet_ Severus had read at breakfast was to be believed, the last Order member had fallen, twenty years after that final battle. 

This Christmas Eve was made still worse by the tracking potion in Severus' pocket. For now, as he walked up the drive to the Dark Lord’s mansion, Potter was safe. In a few hours, he would not be. 

A house elf showed him into the sitting room, lined with Italian tapestries. “Ah, Severus,” the Dark Lord said. “Nice of you to join us.”

“My Lord,” Severus said with a bow. 

“No titles tonight, Severus. What would you have to drink?”

“Whisky, thank you.” A house elf popped next to Snape’s elbow and handed him a fire whisky. 

Bella and Rabastan were stood by the drinks table, arguing about whether kicking the quaffle should be allowed in Quidditch. Bartimus was sat staring into the fire while Anton talked at him about French public opinion. The blonde half-blood boy was sat under the Christmas tree, delving through the presents. Theodore Nott was sat glassy eyed on a sofa, wearing a hideous yellow and red tie, looking like he wished he was elsewhere. Normally, this gathering was limited to the old guard. The last time a youngster had received an invitation was when Flint had scored a decisive blow in the Centaur wars some five years ago. 

Severus sat next to Theodore. “Congratulations on Fletcher,” Severus said to him.

“Thank you, I feared the whisky would take him before we did,” Theodore said. 

“Ah, that reminds me,” the Dark Lord said, summoning the parcel that Euan was shaking vigorously. “Your present Theodore.”

Theodore undid the ribbon on a flat, rectangular box. Euan crossed the room to stand by him, watching intently. Inside the box was an Auror’s uniform. Theodore pulled it out. “Oooh, Deputy Head Auror, Notty boy?” Bellatrix said. 

“Put it on, give us a twirl,” said Rabastan .

Euan was stroking the thick wool of the cloak reverentially. 

Theodore had paled. “I don’t-”

“Do what you like with it, Theodore,” the Dark Lord cut across him. “Wear it, burn it, use it for Quidditch practice. I do not care.”

Theodore’s face brightened a bit at that. He turned to look down at Euan. “Ever wanted to be an Auror?”

Severus thought dressing the half-blood in the uniform was a bold move. But then Theodore had not been quite right since the war. He should have been waving his Pureblood sprogs off to Hogwarts and improving his estate. Instead, he had given his seat on the Wizengemot to a distant second cousin so that he could keep working in an obscure branch of the Aurors, staffed by Slytherins better known for their violence than their intelligence. The War had gutted the sensitive, clever boy Severus had taught, leaving behind a hardened, aloof man whose humour had developed a distinctively cruel streak. 

Still, the Dark Lord had never been especially fond of the Aurors’ Office. ”Too Gryffindor,” he had once confided to Severus. “Too many rules and too few results.”

Perhaps that was why the Dark Lord was laughing as his ward stomped round the room in the shrunken Auror robes, squeaking orders to Bellatrix and Rabastan who gave sarcastic salutes before a house elf popped up with the hot blackcurrant juice the boy had demanded. 

“Severus,” the Dark Lord said eventually, standing. 

They moved to the office next door and Severus placed the vial of potion on the desk. The Dark Lord summoned two glasses and divided the dark grey potion between them. Severus drank first and closed his eyes, feeling the burn of the potion as it ran down his oesophagus. And then he felt the tug in his belly. He opened his eyes and saw in the Dark Lord’s eyes that he had felt a similar sensation. 

“He is back,” the Dark Lord said with a gleeful smile.

* * *

Luna had dragged Harry to the tiny church in the nearest village for the midnight service. The parishioners, in the main, were farmers in tweed jackets and their wives in thick tartan skirts. The church was far plainer than the Anglican one the Dursleys had occasionally attended. The walls were whitewashed and bare but for the occasional plaque remembering those killed in various Muggle wars. While the Minister dourly recited a reading from Matthew, Harry read the names of those far off places where Hebridean soldiers had died: Gallipoli, Lucknow, Passchendaele, Transvaal.

It was only when they stood to sing the hymns that Harry felt glad Luna had insisted he came. The congregation's voices rose, swelling in the high roof of the church. He was reminded of Christmases as a child, listening to the Carols from King’s on the radio as he rolled out the pastry for mince pies he would never get to eat. He remembered his first Christmas at Hogwarts, pulling a cracker with Ron and laughing as the spelled mice sprang from the inside. He recalled a photograph he had found in Sirius’ room in Grimmauld Place, his parents and the other Marauders sat round a table littered with the detritus of Christmas dinner, their faces flushed with wine, absurd hats from wizard crackers perched on their heads.

When the service ended and they walked out into the cold night, shaking the Minister’s hand as they left, Harry felt a deep sense of peace. 

* * *

Theodore was still not entirely sure why he had been invited to the party. Everyone else, bar the child, had at least twenty years and several levels of seniority on him. 

Professor Snape was the only Death Eater he knew well and he had disappeared early on. Crouch had begged exhaustion and left soon after. The child had been led off to bed by a house elf, still wearing that ridiculous uniform. At some stage, the Dark Lord sat down next to Theodore on the sofa, calling the house elf and handing Theodore another whisky and soda. Rabastan Lestrange began complaining about Hogwarts where, Theodore had deduced, he was this year’s Dark Arts professor as punishment for a failed diplomatic mission to Albania. “Honestly, the little blighters are all far too well-behaved,” Lestrange said, looking perplexed. “I barely get to punish any of them. Even the Weasley half-breed doesn’t get up to anything.”

“I would have thought that was cause for celebration,” Dolohov said. “It shows the extent of our Lord’s control in only a few short years.”

“Come, Anton,” the Dark Lord said, “we should not begrudge Rabastan’s desire to have a little fun.”

“Maybe I had too high expectations,” Lestrange said. “Carrow told me about the glory years when the Gryffindors' rebellious spirit had yet to be crushed and Zonko’s was still in business.”

“Maybe I should look again at the curriculum,” the Dark Lord said consideringly. “I do not want an army made up entirely of sheep.”

“Just mostly,” Bellatrix said with a harsh laugh.

“Oh yes, but what happens when you, my most trusted followers, decide to take well deserved retirement?” the Dark Lord asked. “I would have blooded replacements. Theodore’s generation, after all, bore the brunt of the War’s losses. We need the current Hogwarts’ students to step into the breach.”

“I will never retire, my Lord,” Bellatrix said, with a bow. 

“Most admirable, Bella. But there is no need for you to work until you die. You have already given your youth and more to our cause. Narcissa told me this week that she intends to retire as head of the Wizangemot within the year.”

“Who will you replace her with?” Dolohov asked, leaning forward, his scarred face caught in the firelight.

“Bones, maybe.”

“But she is a blood traitor,” Bellatrix hissed.

“Not to mention a Liberal,” Theodore said.

The Dark Lord smiled. “What better way to show that we are a true democracy? Besides, a number of the Pureblood Wizengemot representatives are Liberal these days. Lady Greengrass, for example. Or the cousin that Theodore here has appointed to be the Nott representative.”

“She is not,” Theodore choked.

“I fear you need to look closer at her voting record, Theodore. She might be an independent but she votes more with the Liberal than the Conservative interest.”

Theodore vowed to actually start reading the reports his cousin sent him. “And that does not displease you?”

“Not especially. She was the deciding vote on the bill for Abbott’s prep school. The school that my ward now attends. Besides, it looks likely the Liberals will win the next election. It would be impolitic to have the second chamber stuffed with conservatives.”

“You are not worried that they will work against your interests?” Dolohov asked.

“No. Parliamentary politics is incapable of any real revolution. Reform I can deal with.”

After this discussion, the conversation petered out. The Lestranges left with much bowing, followed shortly by Dolohov. Theodore made to stand but the Dark Lord placed a hand on his thigh. “I would have you in my bed tonight, Theodore.”

It was not quite an order but Theodore did not refuse it. He followed the Dark Lord up a spiral staircase and down a low corridor to a bedroom decorated in deepest blue. The Dark Lord shrugged off his outer robes and wrapped Theodore’s tie round his fist, pushing him down on the bed. As he straddled Theodore’s hips, Theodore wondered if this was the real reason for the Dark Lord’s recent interest in him. When the Dark Lord kissed him brutally, all tongue and teeth and little in the way of lips, he ceased to think at all.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: homophobic slur and (consensual) sexual content between two teenagers.

Theodore spent most of his week off fishing. His great uncle Tiberius had been a great admirer of Muggle fishing and Theodore had fond childhood memories of watching him cast on the Nott tranche of the Tweed. Theodore made sure he kept his uncle’s fishing equipment in good order, even if he did not get to use the four miles of the Tweed as often as he liked. December was technically out of season but Theodore doubted the Dark Lord cared much about enforcing those sorts of laws. 

It was hard to think about the Dark Lord when watching the river flow past, the water pressing cold and firm against his waders, the occasional tug on the rod. But Theodore thought of the man when he landed his first salmon, gripping the squirming body, pulling the hook from the lip, and bashing the skull in with a rock. 

After that, Theodore released the fish he caught. He told himself he was only complying with the law.

The day before New Year's Eve, he returned to the Nott Mansion, his right arm aching comfortably and his mind at rest. His peace lasted as long as it took for a frantic house elf to meet him in the entrance hall. “Master,” the creature said, “the Dark Lord was looking for you.”

Theodore sat down to pull off his boots. “Did he leave a message?”

“He is in the west sitting room.” 

Theodore stilled. “He's still here?”

“Yes, Master.”

“Right, thank you Jinky.”

Theodore walked slowly down the corridor to the West Wing. The portraits on the wall shifted, hissing to each other. Theodore caught the occasional phrase: “Under the thumb”, “Scared of the man”, “Bloody queer.” Theodore ignored them, opening the sitting room door. The Dark Lord was sat by the fireplace, the flames casting the features of his face in stark relief. 

“My Lord,” Theodore said, dipping his neck.

“Come now, Theodore. None of that.” The Dark Lord gestured to an armchair opposite. “Where have you been hiding?”

“The Scottish Borders.” Theodore sat. ”A fishing holiday.” 

“Catch much?” 

“A few,” Theodore said cautiously and snapped his fingers for an elf. He turned to Jinky. “Cognac and whatever the Dark Lord would like.” 

“Brandy is fine.” The Dark Lord said and the elf disappeared. “I wished to talk to you about Fletcher and what I learnt from him.”

Theodore looked up from the spot where the elf had been. “Ah.”

“I would show you his memories. I trust you have a pensieve.”

Theodore nodded. “In the library.” He snapped his fingers again and another house elf appear. “Fetch the pensieve Honky.”

“Yes, Master,” the elf said and disappeared. 

The two elves reappeared almost simultaneously. Theodore set down the pensieve on a Japanned occasional table and accepted the glass. The Dark Lord took a sip of the brandy before pulling a memory strand from his forehead. He signalled for Theodore to enter the pensieve. Theodore took a deep breath and ducked his head into the memory. He found himself stood in an attic surrounded by dusty trunks and broken furniture. In front of him, Fletcher was burrowing through a collection of old magazines. Theodore stepped forward and noted that the magazines seemed to be pornographic in nature. The Dark Lord was suddenly next to Theodore, his mouth set in a thin line. “Where-” Theodore began.

“Grimmauld Place,” the Dark Lord said. “Watch carefully.”

Theodore kept watching the scene and, then, there was a brief flicker, like when a photograph looped. “His memory’s been tampered with,” Theodore said. 

“Quite. But by whom?”

“The only people who still have access to the house are Order members.” Theodore let out a faint laugh. “Maybe Fletcher was right about Lovegood.”

“Is that the only possible suspect?”

“Well, Harry Potter of course. But that’s impossible.”

“Is it?” The Dark Lord gripped Theodore’s shoulder and dragged him from the memory. “I have intelligence that Potter is once more at large.”

Theodore sunk heavily to the sofa and gulped his Cognac. “Fuck. You really think this could be him?”

The Dark Lord snapped his fingers and Jinky appeared. “More brandy.”

“Yes, sir,” Jinky said, disappearing abruptly. 

“I believe you were at school with Potter?”

“Yes. Although I cannot claim to have known him well.”

The Dark Lord gave a thin smile. The elf reappeared with a bottle of Theodore’s best Cognac and refilled their glasses. The Dark Lord thanked her and turned back to Theodore. “I want you to find him.”

Theodore fumbled his glass, Cognac dripping onto his checked shirt. “My Lord?”

The Dark Lord appeared not to notice Theodore’s clumsiness. “How long has Potter been on the missing wizard’s list?”

“Twenty-five years, give or take.”

The Dark Lord bared his teeth. “I would have thought MisWiz would want him off their books.”

Theodore tugged at the hair at the nape of his neck. “Always, my Lord.”

“You have until the end of next year.” The Dark Lord stood smoothly. “Otherwise you will fill the post of Head Auror when Runcorn is elected to the Assembly.”

Theodore stared at the empty space from where the Dark Lord had just apparated with a loud crack for a few moments before calling for Jinky again. She arrived with the Cognac bottle in hand. "I need to strengthen the wards," he said, holding out his glass.

* * *

After an invitation by an extremely formal text from Severus, Luna and Harry travelled to Edinburgh for New Year. Nearly as soon as they arrived, Harry pulled out his wand and started casting jinxes on the lumpy sofa in the sitting room and did not stop until Luna called him for lunch.

That night, Luna took Harry to an opening in a gallery abutting Waverley Train Station. The show was entitled “The Scottish Sea”. Luna had a handful of canvases on display and, while she did not much care for critics or art buyers, it was nice nonetheless to see her squares of Herbridean sea under the soft gallery lighting. 

Harry slouched round the gallery, sneaking glasses of cheap white wine, the picture of teenage insouciance. He had grown out his hair out on the top, keeping the sides shaved short, as was the fashion nowadays. That afternoon, he had asked her for money to buy clothes and returned with an assortment of Muggle sportswear that Luna admired for their vibrant colours rather than their fit. 

Even so, Harry had been bored and starved of magic for a very long time. Luna knew, could sense, that their period of relative peace was coming to an end. 

The next morning, on New Years Eve, Severus arrived in time for lunch. He told them that the Dark Lord knew of Harry’s return. He told them Harry would be hunted. He told them to return to wherever they were hiding as soon as possible. He vowed them to secrecy with his wand. 

“But what am I supposed to do?” Harry snarled towards the end of the meal. “Just keep skulking round, waiting for another Horcrux to drop into my lap? Wait for the Shit Lord to drop dead?”

“He is immortal. Do you know what that word means?”

“Fuck you, Snape.”

“It means you cannot kill him, Potter.”

“I dream of him, Snape. I dream of him every other night and wake up wanting him dead.”

Severus turned pale. Luna said nothing to intervene. She pushed the red wine bottle across the table to Severus. 

“I shouldn’t,” Severus said with a grimace. “I have a party to attend this evening although I would rather your company.”

Harry snorted and emptied the bottle into his own glass. 

After Severus left, Luna dressed casually and announced she was going out for a few hours. Harry barely glanced up from watching a Miss Marple re run on ITV3.

She walked through the dark Edinburgh streets. Revellers were already beginning to congregate, smoking outside pubs and passing bottles of sparkling wine between each other on the street. She disillusioned herself in a dark close in the Old Town and walked carefully to a jewelers shop. Luna unlocked a side door and took a number of Muggle necklaces, shoving them into a backpack before going to erase the CCTV. She exited the same way she had entered, returning to Severus’ flat unnoticed through the crowds watching the fireworks display. 

* * *

Harry fell asleep with the television still on. He dreamt of trying to find Hermoine in the stacks of Hogwarts’ library as the shelves expanded ever outwards. 

Then the dream fractured and his head hurt and he was in a long ball room. There were children, chasing in and out of the dancing adults. The food looked like it had come from one of the more excessive Hogwarts’ feasts. A waiter crossed i front of him, bearing a tray containing drinks of every colour. The music was faintly familiar, a variation on some half-remembered elven ditty. He looked down at his hands. They were invisible, like he was in his animagus form. Harry looked up and saw Snape enter and stride along the side of the room. He followed carefully, slipping into a side room before Snape could close the door. 

“Ah Severus,” said a smooth voice from the fireplace.

Harry jumped. Snape walked over to the figure and bowed. “My Lord.”

Harry crept closer to the pair. Up close, Voldemort looked like someone’s rich, friendly uncle. The sort who would rakishly slip a ten pound note into his nephew’s palm with a wink as he left. Harry shuddered. 

“What do you have for me on Harry Potter?”

“I have a number of potions brewing. It would be a fairly straightforward task with some of his bodily matter. Right now I am not sure we can even pinpoint if he is in Britain.”

Voldemort tilted his head. “I will ask Montague to ask the Seers. I have already set Theodore Nott on the case. I will increase the resources at MisWiz. They have connections with the Muggle Police. We might as well cover all bases.”

“Very good, my Lord,” Snape said.

Voldemort bared his teeth and, in the flickering fire light, seemed to be looking straight at Harry. “I want him found, Severus. I want him kneeling at my feet.”

Harry woke with a pounding headache, drenched in sweat. He lay there for a few minutes, wondering if what he had seen was real. The TV had turned itself off and his watch read 11.12. He went to the window and threw it open. Down below, in the cold night, Muggles were talking loudly and laughing. The thump of music was audible from far off. Harry picked up one of the bottles Snape had brought as a gift. He downed the potion and felt the bones in his face shift minutely. Before lunch had descended into a slanging match, Snape had launched into a long spiel about how he had created the potion. Harry hadn't paid much attention to Snape's lecture beyond the potion was a weak variant of the Polyjuice Potion. It did not force the consumer into a whole new body but rather made small adjustments to their own body.This fact extended the lifespan of the potion from hours to weeks. "It never ceases to amaze me how effective just changing a person's skin colour and the shape of their nose can be," Snape had said, sipping his wine smugly. 

Harry looked down at his now milk white hands and shuddered. He picked up his jacket and a bottle of whisky that was in the cupboard and made for the stairs. He realised as soon as the tenement door clicked closed that he had left his key inside and he should probably have brought his invisibility cloak. 

Then he shrugged. For one night, he just wanted to be a Muggle teenager. Later, Luna could let him back in and then tell him off in a disappointed tone. He wandered though the crowds, slugging whisky. The high street was shut off for a ticketed event so Harry made his way round to Old Town via a circuitous route. In a market square, beneath the looming castle, a group of teenagers were gathered round a set of speakers, dancing and drinking. Before he knew what he was doing, Harry’s legs started to move. He closed his eyes and let his thoughts drift away until there was nothing more than the music and the movement of his body. Then there were fireworks exploding above him. Harry stopped dancing and looked up as they illuminated the castle. A girl with long dark hair, falling perfectly straight, ear muffs perched on her head, came over to him. She kissed him gently on the lips. Harry stilled for a second and then kissed her back hungrily. Right at that moment, he needed the taste of her mouth, her tongue against his, the pleasant feeling in his belly, her hands round his waist. She pulled back, breathless, her ear muffs at an angle. “Not just a good dancer,” she said in a refined Scottish accent. 

Harry blushed and offered her the bottle of whisky. She took a slug, her eyes on him.

“After party at mine,” another girl said, pausing by them. “God, he’s well fit Roisin.”

Harry ducked his head and the girl in his arms shoved her friend away playfully. “Do you want to come?” she asked Harry, straightening her ear muffs.

“Er, yeah, okay.” 

They took the bus, the group of teenagers commandeering the back seats on the top deck. Harry sat next to Roisin, his arm round her shoulder, her hand on his knee, his bottle of whisky being passed between them. Harry listened contentedly to their chatter about their upcoming prelims and who was going out with whom and the chances of their school in the rugby cup.

The house they ended up at was a substantial Victorian villa in the south suburbs. The carpets were thick and the downstairs toilet had the framed announcement of the host’s birth from _The Times_. A hollowed out elephant foot in the hall held a variety of umbrellas and shooting sticks. Barbour jackets were flung haphazardly over the coat rack. 

Rosin tugged Harry into the kitchen and handed him a beer. “Your friend is well posh,” he said, looking in awe at the kitchen island and matching Cath Kidston mugs over the Aga. 

She smiled and took his hand. “Come on, I’ll give you the grand tour.”

She led him through a sitting room where two boys were playing video games while a girl watched on, an office where a group of broad chested boys were doing shots of a clear spirits, and into a second sitting room where a mass of teenagers were playing ring of fire. Finally, she showed him upstairs and pushed open the door to a dark bedroom. 

They were kissing before they made it to the bed, her hands in his hair, his under her jumper. They stripped the outer layers off each other and then she pulled him down onto the bed. “Fuck, you’re beautiful,” Harry said, pushing his thigh between her legs. 

She laughed at that and undid her bra, dropping it off the side of the bed, leaning forward to kiss his neck. Harry reached for one of her breasts, made brave by the whisky, and thumbed the nipple. She was palming his cock through his jeans and Harry reached down and undid his jeans enough to push them and his boxers down over his hips. 

From that moment, everything faded into the background: the ache from not using his real wand in years, the fear of Voldemort finding him, the pain in his scar. There was only Roisin, the touch of her cold hands on his dick and the warmth of her mouth on his. She spread spread her legs and pulled Harry into position above her. And Harry thought with a grin about telling Ron he had finally got his end away.

The light bulb in the lamp by the bed exploded as Harry remembered Ron was dead. 

“What the hell?” Roisin asked, touching her forehead, her fingers coming away red.

“Oh shit,” said Harry, pulling back, “I’ve got to get out of here.”

“You’re going to leave me here? Like this? I’m bleeding out,” she almost shouted. 

“I’m sorry, I—”

There was a loud pop. “Who the fuck are you old man?” Roisin asked in a high-pitched voice.

Harry turned round, pulling his trousers back up. A middle-aged, dark haired man wearing official looking robes was stood by the door, twirling his wand. “Hands where I can see them kids. Very good. Now which one of you two lovebirds has magic?”

“Magic? This madman’s going to kill us.” Roisin said. 

Harry sat down next to her and gripped her hand tightly. “Go, or I’ll call the police.”

“Muggles are such first-rate morons,” the man said, stepping forward. “Ladies first I suppose.”

He said something in Latin and tapped his wand to Roisin’s bloody forehead. Nothing happened. “Stupefy.”

Harry turned to the passed out girl, rubbing his thumb over her forehead. “No.”

The man rapped his wand against the back of Harry’s head. Harry’s hands, his naked chest, his bare feet were glowing gold. “What the fuck?” Harry said, turning his hands over.

“Quite, my little late blooming wizard.” The man cancelled the spell and gripped the top of Harry’s hair, pulling his head back. “You’re not a Hogwarts’ student out for a bit of Muggle slap and tickle over the hols are you?”

“Do you even speak English?” Harry asked, bringing up his meagre occlumens shields and glaring at the man. 

“Expelliramus. Accio wand.” Nothing happened. “Maybe you are just a Mudblood. Probably almost a squib.”

“Seriously, I have no idea what you’re on about. Are you high?”

“Incarcerous.” Harry’s hands and feet were bound and he fell off the bed. “Now to deal with your harpy girlfriend.”

Harry let his head slump to the carpet. He was drunk and exhausted and still somewhat turned on. He was so, so stupid. 

Above him, the man cast obliviate and hummed. “You two only just met, eh? How scandalous. Still, saves me a lot of work.” He picked up Harry’s jacket and reached down to grasp his hair again. Harry had one last sight of Roisin unconscious and semi-naked on the bed, blood running down her face, before he was apparated away.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: discussion of sexual assault

Theodore looked down at the three children stuck to chairs in the MisWiz corridor. A small black child crying silently. A blonde child who was asleep. A pale teenager, naked from the chest up, with a stupid haircut who flinched away at his approach. 

He stuck his head into Bole’s office. “Another teenager? You’re losing your touch, Bole.”

“He’s probably next to a squib.” Bole looked up with a leer. “Caught him in flagrante with a rather tasty Muggle. Bastard was unlucky. I was called to another accidental incident the street over last year otherwise I’d never have got there so fast.”

Banks, notebook in hand, paused by the door. “Do you think the accidental explosion was something to do with the sex?”

The teenager buried his head in his bound hands and looked like he wished the ground would swallow him up. 

“Hm,” Banks said, watching the teenager closely and pulling out her notebook. “I wonder, was it his first time?”

“You think loss of virginity led to the release of magic?” Theodore asked with scepticism. 

“Nice theory.” Bole licked the end of his quill. “But the poor bastard never got his dick wet. Blew his accidental magical load too early.”

“Can I ask him?” 

“Go mad.”

Banks cancelled the silencing spell. The teenager did not move. “Have you had sex before?” she asked, prodding the teenager with her wand. When she received no response, she followed up with a stinging hex. The teenager gave a muffled yelp. 

“Gosh, can tell you two aren’t members of the blessed 28,” Theodore drawled and cast a spell, tapping the teenager on the head.

“What was that incantation, sir?” Banks asked, scribbling furiously. 

“It’s known as the unicorn charm. Used to be employed before betrothals to make sure the fair maiden’s hymen was intact.” The teenager’s bare skin glowed pure white. “Voilà, the kid’s untouched.”

“I don’t have a fucking hymen you sickos,” the teenager said, finally looking up. 

“Shut him up again would you?” Bole said. “You’re making me feel almost sorry for the Mudblood wanker. I’d have hung back for five minutes if I’d known it was his first time. Probably disillusioned myself and watched from the corner.”

“You paedo-,” the teenager began.

“I am going to have to do more research,” Banks said, recasting the silencing charm. “Maybe gather a few participants for an experiment.”

“Good luck getting that past the ethics board,” Theodore snorted and continued to his office. 

* * *

Harry was kept stuck to a chair and silenced for hours. He had expected to be unmasked when a much older Theodore Nott came down the corridor. But the man had barely glanced at Harry, a look of disdain fixed on his face. 

The two children were taken into the office ahead of him. Harry imagined questioning under veritaserum and legilmency and crucio and wondered when his identity would fall apart. 

Mostly, nothing much seemed to happen in the corridor in which he was trapped. Every so often a paper aeroplane would drift lazily along the ceiling. Nott came out of his office every two hours or so to make coffee. One after the other, Bole led the two other children into his office and when they came out, they fell asleep almost instantly. Just after two o'clock, a woman wearing bright orange robes with nifflers embroidered along the hem opened the door at the end of the corridor. She cooed over the two sleeping children and then squinted suspiciously at Harry. “How old are you?”

Harry glared at her. “He’s silenced, Midgen,” Bole yelled from his office. “Come and sign the papers for the two baby Mudbloods. They’ve both been oblivated.”

The woman left, a sleepy child holding each of her hands. “I swear, that woman has worse taste in robes than Dumbledore,” Bole said above him. “Right, come on Lothario, you’re up.”

Harry found himself unstuck from the chair and Bole steered him into his office. “Imperio,” Bole said coolly.

Harry felt the familiar, blissful sensation wash over him. The shock of being captured fell away. “Hop on one leg,” a voice said.

Harry lifted up one leg and then his mind began to rebel. By the time he had hopped five times on the spot and Bole had told him to stop, he was almost fully back in control of his body. “Name?”

“Jason Smith,” Harry said, picking the name of a popular boy from his primary school.

“Date of birth?”

“1st July 2002.”

Bole grimaced. “A new record.” He pulled open his desk and produced something that looked like a spinning top. “Open your mouth. Stick out your tongue.” He spun the object round in Harry’s mouth then set it point down on the table. Harry kept staring straight ahead. 

The object began to emit a high pitched whistling noise. Bole gave it a sceptical look. “Must be faulty.” He pulled out another device and shoved it in Harry’s mouth. This one too emitted a high pitched whistling sound. 

“Fucking hell.” Bole stood up and went to the door. “Banks, get in here. I need you to check something.”

Banks came in holding a 2015 Arithmatic Challenge mug. She shoved a third device in Harry’s mouth. It joined the other two on the desk, spinning madly. “He’s powerful,” she said, pulling out her notepad.

Bole made a movement with his wand, cancelling the Imperius charm. “Pity. I was looking forward to draining him and dropping him outside of a Muggle Police station. I did a right number on girl at the scene. He’d have been done for rape.”

“You’re a cunt,” Harry snarled.

“Language,” Banks said, hitting Harry with a stinging hex. “Sure he’s not just a wizard pretending, sir?”

“There’s no kids his age currently missing and that is not a regulation Hogwarts’ haircut,” Bole said with a scowl, sweeping the whistling tops off his desk and into an envelope where they quietened. “I suppose I’d better owl Yaxley.” 

“I’m not sure where this leaves my sex theory,” Banks said, peering at Harry.

“Stop talking about my sodding sex life,” Harry said. 

“Take the mouthy virgin to the cells,” Bole said, casting another silencing charm on Harry before he was dragged off by Banks. 

* * *

Theodore went to the archive and pulled out Harry Potter’s file. 

He spread it out on a worn desk. The original missing report had apparently been filed by Dumbledore. Theodore almost snorted at Potter’s favourite colour being red and gold. There were duplicated files, some Muggle and others wizarding, of his birth certificate and medical documents. He paused at a police report. Potter had trespassed on a school roof aged ten and been let off with a warning. Most of the other facts he knew. Only the other defining markings gave him pause: a lightning scar on his forehead, burns from a dragon on his back, and a basilisk bite on his left shoulder.

Theodore wondered where in hell Potter had met a basilisk. He made copies of the file and the provided photograph, seemingly from a Triwizard press release. He pulled Lovegood’s file too for good measure. Hers was thinner than Potters. She had fled from Hogwarts before the Carrows had come for her and then from a snatcher who had been executed for his mistake. There were a handful of sightings along the coast of Europe that ended with her supposed death at sea. The Spanish Aurors had not bothered to check the rotted corpse’s magical signature. The fact that it was a witch was enough for them.

Theodore sighed and went to look for magical deaths at a similar time period and locale, coming back with only two. He dismissed the death of a Spanish witch in an orange grove after swallowing a wasp as unlikely. He flipped through the file of an undercover Auror whose body had never been recovered, pausing at the page which said her last mission had been tracking suspicious magical activity in Western Europe. 

Back in his office, he wrote to the Spanish government to request that the Lovegood corpse be exhumed and the magical signature tested. 

* * *

“Tell me about your childhood,” Banks said gently.

Harry goggled at her. “Erm, it wasn’t great.”

After being taken to the cells last night he had expected to be Crucioed at the very least. Instead, he had been given dinner of stew and potatoes and allowed to sleep. The next morning, Banks had come to collect him and led him to an office where he was now sat, asking him about his childhood without so much of an Imperio.

Harry did not lie much. He altered the names of his guardians but the details of the starving, imprisonments and casual violence he had experienced at the hands of the Durselys remained the same. The woman exhibited no surprise. When Bole came into the office and held out his hand for her notes, she said, “Textbook case.”

Bole glanced at the notes. “Yeah, nothing special.” He held out Harry’s jacket. “Come on Romeo, you’ve got an appointment with Yaxley.”

Harry pulled it over his head and followed Bole down the corridor. “Aren’t you going to obligate me?”

Bole turned to him with a nasty grin. “Oh no, we only do that to the kids with happy childhoods.”

Harry swallowed as the man pulled him into a lift that took them up to the atrium. “Who’s Yaxley?”

“Shut up or I’ll silence you again.” 

Harry gained a few curious looks in the atrium. He kept his head down and Bole dragged him to the floo. “Hogwarts,” the man grunted before shoving Harry into the flames.

Harry spun for so long he almost hoped Bole had misspoken and he would be spat out somewhere far from Britain. Eventually he landed on a furry rug and vomited up the porridge he had been given for breakfast. Bole stepped over him and vanished the mess. “Headmaster Yaxley.”

“What on earth have you brought me this time, Sergeant Bole?” a man’s deep voice said. 

“This scrote has a weak stomach,” Bole said, reaching down and pulling Harry to his feet, “but strong magic.”

“He must be at least fourteen,” Yaxley said, his eyes narrowed. “How did he evade your lot for so long?”

“Banks thinks it is linked to his sex drive. Late developer.”

“I am going to fucking slaughter you,” Harry muttered, shaking the man’s hand off his shoulder.

Yaxley looked unimpressed and opened a drawer, taking out another of the whistling devices. “Show me, Sergeant Bole.”

Bole took the device from Yaxley and passed it to Harry. “You know the drill, kid.”

Harry shoved it in his mouth like a lolly and set it on Yaxley’s desk. It began to spin shrilly and lit a bright white colour. Yaxley took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes tiredly. “I imagine it’s white because I’m still a virgin,” Harry said helpfully. 

Bole landed a stinging hex on the back of his legs. “Stop being a little shit.”

“It is white because you are an exceptionally strong wizard,” Yaxley said slowly, looking at Harry. “Although what I am supposed to do with an untrained fourteen year old, half way through the school year is beyond me.”

“Fifteen,” Harry said.

“Even better.”

“You are going to take him?” Bole asked, doubt creeping into his voice for the first time.

“Yes, Sergeant Bole. Give me the damn form to sign.”

“Can I see what house he’s sorted into?” Bole asked, handing over a sheaf of forms. “We’ve got a sweep stake in the office.”

“It’s in the cupboard,” Yaxley said, pulling out a pen. “Put a Galleon on Hufflepuff for me would you?”

Bole got the hat out of the cupboard and pushed Harry into a chair. Harry eyed the hat warily, wondering if it would give him away. “Don’t fidget, it bites,” Bole said before he dropped the hat on Harry’s head.

The hat was silent for a long time. Harry stared into the dark material and wondered if it just would not respond.

“Well, well, you have been on quite a journey since I last saw you,” it said at last. “Don’t worry, I won’t give you away.”

“Gryffindor,” Harry thought hard.

“Oh no, I don’t think so, not after you left his sword with all these snakes.” The hat made a humming noise for a good five minutes. “I would put you in Hufflepuff but I do so hate the idea of Yaxley winning his bet. Better be SLYTHERIN.”

No one lifted the hat off his head so in the end Harry pulled it off himself. “What?” he asked on seeing the two men’s shocked expressions. “Did you both bet on me being in Uptheduff?”

“Smith is a Pureblood name,” Yaxley said hopefully. 

“Look at his haircut Headmaster, he’s a Mudblood through and through.”

“When was the last time a Muggleborn was in Slytherin?”

“You’re the headmaster of this school, you tell me,” Bole said. 

“Look, just put me in Pifflehuff,” Harry said. “I won’t tell anyone what the talking hat said.”

“What on earth did it talk to you about for so long, Smith?”

“Oh, it just made a humming noise and said it would’ve put me in Jigglypuff only it didn’t want Yaxley to win his bet.”

“Don’t be cheeky,” Bole said.

Yaxley sighed again and stood up, crossed to throw floo powder into the fire and stuck his head in. “Lestrange? I need to speak to you.” 

The two men sat and watched Harry while they waited for Lestrange to appear. The magical device was still whistling on the desk. Harry’s feet started tapping. He only hoped that it was not Bellatrix who had been summoned. He had seen a ferocious picture of her in the _Prophet_ and doubted she would let him into the Slytherin common room in one piece. 

A tall, thin man eventually entered the office, his hair more grey than brown. He appraised Harry with obvious distaste. “What is it, Yaxley?”

“Newest member of your house, Jason Smith. He was just picked up by Bole. He’ll be in first year classes after the holidays.”

“A Mudblood?” the man asked, standing over Harry and reaching down to tilt his head back. Harry met his cold eyes reluctantly. “Maybe this year will be interesting after all.”

* * *

Theodore spent the morning at Scotland Yard. The Christmas decorations were still up and a number of the detectives he passed seemed to be still sporting hangovers. He told Hornby about the Mundungus capture and she told him about the rape case in Edinburgh that had the police stumped. “That’s one of ours. Bole thought he could provide you with a suspect but it turns out the boy’s extremely magical.”

“I suppose it will have to remain unsolved,” Hornby said, making a note. 

Theodore nodded and pulled out the teenage photographs of Potter and Lovegood. “Your lot do images which age up missing people, right?”

“Yes,” she said, looking at the photographs. “Harry Potter?”

“Quite. I’d appreciate if you keep this under wraps. The order comes from the Dark Lord himself.”

“Of course,” Hornby said. “I’ll see to it immediately.”

“Thank you, Detective Inspector.”

“For the Dark Lord, anything.”

* * *

Lestrange took him to the nurse and stood in the corner of the infirmary, watching with amusement as Harry choked on the Dragon Pox vaccination potion. Then he led Harry to a room on the ground floor which had been a deserted classroom when Harry was a student. Now it was full of school supplies. 

“Stand still,” Lestrange said and released a measuring tape.

Lestrange picked up a cauldron and walked along the shelves lining the room, throwing in books, parchment and quills. He came back to Harry, dropping the cauldron at his feet and took the measuring tape, tapping it with his wand. A thin ribbon of paper emerged. Lestrange took it and walked along a shelf of uniforms in a variety of sizes. Lestrange pulled three sets of robes out from halfway along the row and walks back to Harry. “Change,” he said, holding out one of the robes, dropping the other two into the cauldron. 

With fumbling hands, Harry stripped down to his underwear and pulled on the robe. It fitted him well enough, if a bit broad at the shoulders. Lestrange vanished his jacket and addidas trackie bottoms. “What?” Harry said, looking down at the floor where his new clothes had been.

“No Muggle clothes, Smith.” Lestrange turned away and picked up a box. “The wandmaker only comes at the beginning of the summer term. You’ll have to make do with one of these until next year.”

Harry peered into the box and picked up a wand at random, releasing it with a yelp when a spark like electricity hit his hand. Finally, a pale yellow wand (”Oak, no idea about the core,” Lestrange said disinterestedly) fired faint red sparks when he picked it up. 

“This is all being provided free of charge to you, Smith,” Lestrange droned, shoving the full cauldron at Harry. “Look after it. If you want to write a thank you note, send it to the Mudblood Orphan Education Fund.”

“Right,” Harry muttered, looking down at the battered wand in his hand. 

“I believe the correct response is ‘Thank you sir,’” Lestrange said.

“Thank you, sir,” Harry echoed.

Lestrange took him to the silent Slytherin common room and sat opposite him. “Just a few more things to tick off.” He spoke a cutting charm and Harry felt the sensation of a blade pass across his skull. “You’ll have to learn that spell. Ask a prefect to do it for you until you have. Hair needs to be kept at the regulation length.”

“Yes sir,” Harry said mutinously, rubbing the half inch of hair left on his head. 

“Rule book,” Lestrange said, throwing a pamphlet at Harry. “You’ll need to memorise it before you’re allowed out of the castle. First year dormitories are through that door. Take the empty bed. Lastly, I’ll need your blood for the wards.”

“My blood?”

Lestrange already had a vial in his hand and gripped Harry’s left arm, pulling up his sleeve. “Just a little scratch, Smith,” he said, casting another cutting charm and letting the vial fill up before closing the wound. “Wouldn’t want you running away after all the trouble we took to get you.” He patted Harry’s head condescendingly. “You have five days to get to know the castle and read your textbooks. I’ll see you at dinner.”

Lestrange strode out of the common room, leaving Harry alone in the flickering gloom, pushing down the sleeve of his robe.


End file.
